by Iris Smyles
My heart was racing from the excitement of our first kiss and all its philosophical ramifications, and for a second I thought I might be having a panic attack. I considered asking Kevin to take my pulse, but decided against it for fear it would ruin the mood. Instead, I just let him kiss me and tried to breathe more evenly through my nose.
I arched my back so that my breasts brushed against him. His chest hair tickled wonderfully at first, but then it just started to itch, so I writhed against him more as an alternative to scratching. At last I managed to get my hand up between us to scratch my left breast. I gave a quick scratch to my right one too while I was there, and then higher on my chest, and then on my neck, and then on my shoulder . . .
“Oh, god, I’m so itchy!” I said finally, breaking away. “I can’t stand it!”
He moved off to give me some air.
“You’ve broken out in hives,” he said calmly, retrieving his glasses from the side table. He gave a good look at my neck and chest, while I went on scratching.
“What?” I scrambled to my feet and ran into the bathroom. “Usually this doesn’t happen until after I’ve committed the love act!”
It’s true. I turn phosphorescent during orgasm. I’m a lot like a poisonous jellyfish that way; my skin glows red and purple in spots, but only during the agitation, ex-boyfriends have told me. I return to my natural color immediately after.
I looked in the mirror. “Oh, god,” I said, seeing myself red and puffy. I threw an arm over my face. “I’m hideous!”
Kevin came in, took my arm from my face, and gently placed it by my side. He looked at me in the mirror. I looked at him in the mirror. There we were, a portrait in the medicine cabinet.
“It must be the cats,” he said calmly, and reached for the mirror, opening it as if he were opening my chest. Our image disappeared and was replaced by an assortment of bottles, pills, creams, and pastes. He removed a narrow tube of something and closed the door. I watched his reflection squeeze the contents of the tube onto his fingertips. “Here,” he said, making eye contact with my reflection, before breaking it to look at me.
He began applying the ointment to my neck, my chest, and then my arms. “Don’t worry,” he smiled. I closed my eyes and gave myself over to the feel of the cream, which was cool and lovely against my welts.
What hath night to do with sleep?
—JOHN MILTON, Paradise Lost
Dengue Fever
1
MY DAD CAN’T SLEEP. When the sun goes down, his worries attack, and he lies in bed, nervous and awake. At 3 AM, “the witching hour,” he’ll tiptoe downstairs and turn on the TV; the witching hour is also the hour of the infomercial.
I can easily assess the severity of my father’s insomnia by the number of odd items he has delivered to the house each month. Greek language tapes, Moving Robots (plastic disks placed under a piece of furniture you’d like to move before effortlessly sliding it to its new position!), the Pasta Pot (a pot whose cover doubles as a colander!), Space Bags (store bulky sweaters in this giant ziplock and then use your vacuum cleaner to suck out the air, reducing clutter by 75 percent!), and a knife that can cut easily through a silver dollar, though why you would want to cut through a silver dollar, I don’t know. Recently his late-night purchases have hewn to a theme: fitness.
I can almost see him yawning before the TV, cruising the channels, when his attention is arrested by a promise of great change. The light from the TV flickers and a hazy vision of a new him comes into focus. There he is, muscular and trim, his large belly replaced by a set of chiseled abs. “Ordinary sit-ups are uncomfortable on the back. The Ab Roller eliminates lower back discomfort once and for all, making strong, toned abs just three easy payments away!” And there he goes dialing. Only $39.99! So small a price for so grand a transformation.
Every visit home begins with my father, physically unchanged, telling me excitedly about his most recent acquisition: the Bean, the Abdominizer, the Ab Roller, the Total Gym . . . I walk in and he rushes to fetch it. “It’s in the storage room,” he says, already descending the basement stairs.
Minutes later he’s dusting the thing off and leading me to the living room to show me how it works. This demonstration will be the last time he’ll use it. He shows me his ThighMaster, and I suggest that next time he can’t sleep, instead of buying something new, he just use one of the many old things he has already. “That way you’ll save money AND get in shape!”
“That’s not how it works, Iris,” he answers simply.
Having recently experienced my own bouts of insomnia, I know what he means.
Then my mother brings out a box of cannolis, and we sit around the kitchen table for coffee. I pick up the white and red string thoughtfully. “Twine left over from a box of cannolis,” I say, paraphrasing a line of Hemingway’s, “many must have it.”
2
Summer in the city and the night falls late. I strip down to my underwear and throw my clothes in a pile on the floor beside the bed. The pile is high with yesterday’s and the days’ before. But I can’t clean up now. Later. Always later.
My bed takes up most of the room, with a bathroom and closet on one side and a bank of windows, most of them cracked, along the other. In the corner, where the bed and windows nearly meet, a heating pipe runs vertically from floor to ceiling. In winter it gets horrifically hot and the pipe clangs loudly, as if on another floor someone were beating it with spoons. In front of the pipe, I’ve squeezed a small nightstand that holds a little library of sex manuals—for reference during moments of passion—along with a lamp, an alarm clock, and my tip jar.
The tip jar is left over from a brief stint as a coat-check girl. I made it myself, taping a slip of paper to a cylindrical glass vase that came with a bouquet of flowers sent previously to convey an apology. The flowers died, and in purple curlicued letters I wrote: “Tips!”
Not knowing what to do with it after, I installed it on my nightstand, which led to an argument with the guy I’ve been seeing.
“Someone else been tipping you?” Philip asked, noticing that the once-empty jar now contained fifty suspicious cents.
I’d dropped the coins in myself, hoping to inspire a conversation about our relationship. Haughtily, I replied, “I’m thinking of installing a coin-operated condom dispenser, too. A little one above the headboard might really bring the room together. Plus, a quarter here and there really adds up.” I told him I was inspired by the stories of self-made millionaires, teachers and postal workers who’d amassed great fortunes by saving their change. I’d seen a show about it. The UPN network airs reruns of Oprah at 4 AM on weekdays, and I watch it sometimes when I can’t sleep. That or a disaster movie. Stories about great and glittering promise gone awry—a glass skyscraper on fire, a state-of-the-art ship sinking. I like The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure best. Yawning before the TV, watching the characters scream, I find myself somehow soothed.
On hot nights like this one, I sleep with all the windows open. A fan, oscillating in the corner, ushers a warm breeze. I have an air conditioner, but don’t use it. It’s old, weak; its icy wheezing no match for the hot air leaking through the cracked windows that surround it. No match either for the restaurant ovens three floors below, burning all day, cooking the entire building.
From the street, the sound of late-night revelers echoes up—bawdy drag queens commuting from club to club, drunken frat boys spilling out of sports bars, and girls searching for love or at least a free drink, their slurred cries punctuated by clicking heels. Every twenty minutes, the M11 bus stops out front, its engine slows, its brakes screech, its doors open and close, before it takes off east. Around 5 AM, the garbage truck arrives, and before or after a fire engine roars, a police siren whirls or else bleeps quick. A concert of irritants, the night plays on. Oh, but to live in the heart of Greenwich Village! So what if the heart of the Village beats loudly.
In winter I sleep with the windows open, too, to mitigate the unchecked he
at pouring out from the overactive radiators and the scalding pipe next to my bed. Last winter a man accidentally touched it. It was 4 AM—isn’t it always when one’s sleep is disturbed?—when he woke me requesting ice. “Stretch your arm out the window and you’ll be fine. There now,” I said, kissing him. “It’s snowing.”
In summer the windows not only bring breezes, but bugs, flies, mosquitoes, and other winged things whose names I don’t know. In summer my apartment becomes an “auxiliary circle of hell,” what Dante cut from his manuscript shortly before publication. Just off the second circle, where the lustful are tossed in an endless gale, lies Dante’s “3rd-Floor Walk-Up,” where New Yorkers are made to carry their bikes up and down the stairs during the hot summer months, which last for all eternity.
But one can get used to anything, even hell, and eventually come to appreciate its fiery vistas, which do, after all, cast a fine light. And so, I’ve grown accustomed to my apartment’s small menaces and consider the noise, the bugs, and the heat all part of its charm. Charming, until recently, when into a nightmare, I awoke.
3
I can’t sleep! Or I can, but only for an hour. Then sweating, panicked, blinking into the dark, Where am I? Staring into nothing, I try to untangle myself from the sheets, with which I’ve somnolently formed a cocoon. Is this the beginning of my metamorphosis? To become . . . become . . . become what?
In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise, Amory Blaine dreams of becoming a great football star, of becoming the youngest general in the world. He lies in bed dreaming always of “the becoming, . . . never the being.” Fitzgerald had trouble sleeping, too. In his autobiographical book, The Crack-Up, in a piece called “Waking and Sleeping,” he describes his insomnia, saying how he tried everything, even sleeping “on the heart side,” the left, as it’s rumored to calm the body. After the book was published, Hemingway criticized his friend’s decision to write so personally. To write about oneself was undignified, unmanly, said Hemingway. Years later, in his own memoir, A Moveable Feast, Hemingway suggested that, in addition to being undignified and unmanly, Fitzgerald had a small penis. Their relative penis size is now the stuff of legend. Hemingway, I imagine, also suffered from insomnia. In “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” he summarized the whole business in a line I paraphrase often: “Insomnia, many must have it.”
With thoughts multiplying where I lay, I decide at once, I must get out of bed! I tear off the sheets, fling open the lights, and jump out of bed, gasping. Why am I gasping? Sleep apnea? Why does my elbow itch? Flesh-eating bacteria? I swat a fly that’s flown through the window and landed on my bed, then pause to give its mangled body a closer look. Is this a fly? Why no, it looks so strange! What is it? Dale Samsa, Gregor’s younger cousin . . . Why can’t I sleep? Why can’t I sleep? And then it hits me.
I sit down at my desk, turn on the computer, and begin to type.
I Google nine different diseases and realize I have all of them. I contemplate my relationship with Philip, which further fuels my worry. In Dante’s hell, sinners are punished according to their sins. The lustful Paolo and Francesca are tossed, forever, in a terrible wind. Why should things be any different in my apartment? Philip and I try to protect ourselves with condoms, but what is latex against hell’s furious variety? Is there really any way to fully protect oneself against the Clap? Chlamydia? Smallpox? Large Pox, Fun Size, and Jumbo? Against werewolves (I sometimes worry our cries might summon a demon)! Anything is possible! Everything is possible! Anything and everything makes sense in this bitter hour. Is it not called the witching hour for good reason?
When I’ve exhausted all STD research, I move on to sites dedicated to menstruation, just to see if I’m normal. Naturally, I am not. But how can I be both pregnant and in need of a hysterectomy? And how will I afford the medical bills? Moreover, how will I tell Philip? Twins sit lower on the stomach—what I’d thought during the day was a beer belly . . . What shall I name them? Am I too old to be sent away to one of those homes for wayward girls?
A fly lands beside my keyboard. I execute it with a tissue. Unfolding the soft paper, I place the partially squashed bug under the light from my desk lamp to survey its constitution. I Google insects, just the rarest and deadliest. Terrified now for the health of my unborn twins, I rush from the computer and begin cleaning in a mad fever, certain that my apartment is infested!
I strip the bed, throw out the sheets, vacuum the rug, and scrub the floor. Assessing the tall pile of discarded clothes, I consider burning the whole lot. But then I think again of Philip and return to the computer. Bursting with regret, I compose the email one hopes one never has to send.
To: Philip
Subject: VD, many must have it.
I think I have something.
I stand up from my desk and walk zombie-like to the bathroom before, on the toilet, I assume Rodin’s Thinker position. Blinking back tears, I try to comfort myself by composing a top ten list of history’s greatest syphilitics. I’m up to Nietzsche when I notice I’ve gotten my period, and my tears become tears of joy—my hysteria is not syphilitic but premenstrual! I am neither pregnant nor diseased, but merely “cursed”!
I return to the computer, happy until I see a reply from Philip. What is he doing up at this hour? It’s then that I look out the window. The sky is breaking, and the morning light, faint, shows beyond the water towers topping the buildings across the street. Sunrise. A new day. I have made it to the other side. Like Dante seeing stars at the end of The Inferno, here is a sign that Paradiso awaits!
I click on his email.
To: Iris
Subject: Re: VD, many must have it.
What are your symptoms?
Why! Why! Why did I write that email? I hit Reply and type carefully:
My heart, it’s red and swollen. I think you’ve infected me.
4
Dante’s Inferno describes the poet’s journey through hell. Naturally, his commute begins at midnight. Dante, very likely, couldn’t sleep either.
If you’ve ever suffered insomnia, you know too well the relief that comes with the dawn. The birds begin their noisy off-key chorus, the garbage truck reprises its morning dirge, the commuters pile into the M11, and deliveries are made to the restaurants downstairs, while one truck backs up to the curb, beeping a parody of an alarm clock.
A new day commences, and the dark and all its horrors recede. The sun appears in the window, cutting through my apartment like an extraordinary knife my father saw on TV. And just as I’ve gathered all my belongings into the center of the room, just as I’m about to apply the lighter fluid generously, the dawn makes me pause. And it occurs to me: Perhaps a simple wash and fold would do the trick? Like my father, I’ve developed my own insomniac pattern. On the bright side, the will to burn everything returns about once a week, offering in exchange for my night’s suffering a clean apartment in which, during the day, I might convalesce.
5
I switch off the computer and go to the bedroom to lie down. In the light of a new day, I might finally get some sleep. I close my eyes and think of Dante and Fitzgerald and Hemingway, of my own great potential—a Towering Inferno in which I’m trapped at the top. I place myself at the end of a long line of great authors, a top ten list of literary insomniacs. Dante, Fitzgerald, Hemingway . . . What great works might I yet write? I could become a great author! I could become . . . I could become . . . I turn to lie on the heart side and look briefly out the cracked windows. Perhaps the sun might also rise for me.
But later. I’ll get started on all that later. I raise myself up and draw the curtains to shut out the morning in order to better pursue my dreams. Exhausted, I settle into the first nap of the day. There will be many. But when I wake up . . .
The glitter of sunlight on roughened water, the glory of the stars, the innocence of morning, the smell of the sea in harbors, the feathery blur and smoky buddings of young boughs, and something there that comes and goes and never can be captured, the thor
n of spring, the sharp and tongueless cry—these things will always be the same.
—THOMAS WOLFE, You Can’t Go Home Again
The Great Lawn
A THUNDERSTORM CHASED US out of the park. The clouds gathered suddenly and were rising over the wall of trees cutting us away from the rest of the city. The stretch of blue over the green where we sat turned orange and then gray into an almost silver. His hair was silver. He had gray wings; that’s what I called them.
“You have gray wings,” I said, touching his hair, “just over your ears. Has it always been gray?”
“Since I was nineteen. I don’t mind it.”
“You’re a cloud,” I said, leaning back on the grass. He leaned over me, his face against the sky. “A little to the left, Cloud. The sun is in my eyes.”
It was the delicate cool of an early spring day. The kind that says put your shorts on and ride your bike to the park, because the winter was long and summer might never arrive. And shivering without your jacket, pedaling into the wind, you will the summer forward. It was the end of March, and the sky was blue and uncluttered but for a few bare trees; we were going to play Wiffle ball on Central Park’s Great Lawn.
We leaned into the park and laid our bikes at the edge of the green. In the brightest parts of the field, women in bikinis lay sunning themselves, while, nearby, a few men played Frisbee, pausing now and then to look at the girls. We, our limp Wiffle ball league, sat lolling near the edge of the grass, laughing, stealing puffs off a joint we’d rolled at home and sips off the beer warming slowly in our backpacks.