Snooze

by Michael McGirr

  Beans should be roasted between 392 and 464 degrees Fahrenheit and ground immediately before use. The grind of the coffee should be such that an espresso takes twenty-five seconds to work its way through the filter. Too fine and the extraction will be slow and the coffee will taste burnt; too coarse and the extraction will be fast and the coffee will lack body. A normal coffee shop could get through fifty-five pounds of coffee a week; a really busy one might need more than two hundred pounds.

  I quickly did the math. That’s between eight hundred and three thousand cups a day.

  As much as the instructor despised Robusta coffee, he had a special contempt for machines that did all the work for you, including grinding the beans and frothing the milk, the type of machines you find in fast-food drive-thrus.

  “Everyone needs to empower themselves,” he explained. “You need to empower yourself to use your own senses. Have faith in your physical hand, your physical nose, your physical eyes. You must be the driver of the espresso machine. Don’t let it drive you. You can be an artist or a slave—you choose. If the machine is making your decisions, you are its slave. In any café, the person standing behind the coffee machine is the one with real power. That is the command post of the entire business.”

  After lunch, we got practical and started making coffee. There was quite an agenda of styles we had to get through: latte, affogato, doppio, macchiato, mocha, ristretto, cappuccino, long black. Each student held their best effort aloft like a communion cup and was applauded by the group.

  “You came to learn a skill,” the instructor concluded. “I just hope that today you have been empowered.”

  Some years ago, before I became a priest, I helped as a volunteer at The Way, a community for the homeless and needy in Fitzroy, a colorful inner suburb of Melbourne. One of our regulars was Johnny Foster. It was said that Johnny had been an officer in the army. He often slept out in a slouch hat and army coat, and he was a man who, despite his fair share of life’s misfortunes, always carried himself with a military bearing.

  There were countless stories about Johnny. One was that, in May 1978, the funeral of the late Sir Robert Menzies—Australia’s longest-serving prime minister—had started ten minutes late because of Johnny Foster. The story went that the Prince of Wales had flown out overnight to read at the service. That same night, Johnny had been sleeping in one of the many haunts where, in the middle of a big city, people can make themselves invisible. Menzies was being buried from the Scots Church on the corner of Russell and Collins Streets, and a guard had been posted there to lend dignity to the occasion and to keep back the crowds. Just as the cavalcade bearing the Prince of Wales was nearing its destination, Johnny—stately in his great coat—stepped through the guard, took up position in the center of the intersection, and proceeded to direct the official party around the wrong corner. Johnny had such a commanding air that the drivers obeyed. So the cavalcade did another lap of the block, and Menzies was laid to rest a bit later than he may have been otherwise.

  It was that coat that did the trick, making people think Johnny was official, and Johnny Foster sure was inseparable from his coat. He usually slept out and when he returned to The Way punctually at 6:45 AM, he would empty the contents of his coat pockets onto the kitchen table: he unearthed a whole host of found items, from Band-Aids to bricks. Other times, the coat pockets revealed more mysterious items: rosary beads, a police badge, even, on one confusing occasion, cutlery from the exclusive Melbourne Club. Johnny’s coat was his caravan. He both traveled in it and slept in it. And where he’d disappear to at night was unknown by anyone. Where he slept was not our business. The street is a private address.

  Just because you’re homeless, it doesn’t mean you don’t have to sleep. Camping in the woods is one thing. But sleeping out in the city requires special skills. I once knew a man who slept between two shrubs on the median strip in the middle of the busiest road out of Melbourne. He believed that the key to becoming invisible was to make yourself as obvious as possible. Three lanes of traffic sped past in either direction but nobody ever noticed him; he slept here in all seasons for at least eighteen months, and then, suddenly one day, he vanished. He’d tried plenty of other things before he found this solution; he’d slept in forgotten corners of parks and hidden parts of the under-structure of bridges, but the more out of the way his camp, the sooner either the local thugs or police found him. In the plantation in the middle of a highway, he was safe. The only problem, he said, was getting women to have sex there. But then again, he conceded, he was finding it difficult to get women to have sex anywhere. Last time we spoke, he was considering a change of clothes to improve his chances.

  Garbage dumpsters are another possibility for shelter in the night, as long as they are clean and don’t get emptied during the night. I knew another man who slept in a cardboard and paper recycling bin behind a firm of architects. The cardboard was warm and certainly more comfortable than concrete, and he always had papers to read. The first person to arrive at the office every morning had the job of making him a cup of coffee and bringing it out. One year, he was invited to the office Christmas party but declined on the grounds he was a conscientious atheist who had existential objections to celebrating birthdays for gods that don’t exist. The worker who’d made the invitation said that she needed a dictionary to figure out what he meant. The man happened to have a small one in his bag and lent it to her. Indeed, he traveled with English, Greek, and Spanish dictionaries. It was a pity he didn’t go to the party, as the partners in the firm could have learned from him. He once said his experience of homelessness made him think a lot about architecture.

  After an absence of some twenty years from Fitzroy, I found myself back in the same neck of the woods. The area had changed several times over in the meantime, but there is something stubborn about the House of Welcome, an establishment around the corner from the community of homeless people, where I used to live. The House of Welcome has stood by while the rest of the street has seen fashions come and go as cafes open, flourish for a while, fade, and then get made over, always in the search of the perfect cup of coffee. In all that time, the House of Welcome, a familiar place not far from The Way, hasn’t changed its menu because it doesn’t have a menu; the cuisine often includes food donated by local cafes. And coffee. Buckets of hot, cheap coffee with so much sugar you can stand a spoon in the mug. Every Monday morning, a few boys from the school where I teach come to help. They don aprons, put a small cup of cheap coffee powder into a huge pot, add water, and do the rounds. Breakfast is free to all patrons who show up.

  The boys seldom drink coffee with the clients; they tend to nip into the Korean grocery next door where they can buy cheap Red Bull in cans covered with Chinese characters. The whole world drinks caffeine, but the way we get it divides us every which way.

  At one level, the boys come to the House of Welcome to lend a hand. But really the purpose is for them to meet the people they most need to meet: people beyond any network, ones whose lives are so frayed that they have abandoned pretence, people who don’t know where they will sleep tonight. The problem is that with all the serving and washing up, there isn’t always much room for conversation, and the people at the House of Welcome aren’t always much good at it anyway. So sometimes the visits just allow us to feel a gap that is always there but mostly hidden: the gap between those who have their own beds and those who don’t.

  The increasing prevalence of drugs and mental illness has meant that the homeless are harder to engage than maybe they once were, at least as I seem to recall. In my first few weeks at the school, I was able to join some of our senior students late at night as they helped a group called Rosies, which provides soup and sandwiches and friendship to the people who take over the streets around our biggest railway station once all the commuters have gone home safely to bed. The students were a little nervous. They were trying not to make themselves too obvious as they looked wide-eyed over the extraordinary range of bedding that the s
treet people had accumulated: sleeping bags, inflatable mattresses, cardboard shelters, polystyrene shelters, even half a geodesic dome made of broken umbrellas. One man had a dog with him.

  “Best blanket God ever invented,” he said. “And best security, too.”

  At school, I am teaching George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a work that begins with a clock striking thirteen. It’s the period before lunch, and teenagers don’t learn much on an empty stomach. At least it is better than the period after lunch, when they’re prone to falling asleep—although to be frank, returning to the classroom after an interval of eighteen years, I was taken aback by seeing a few students dozing off at any time. I am too vain to sheet this all home to the dreariness of my teaching. There are other reasons. Some of the students have part-time jobs that keep them up late midweek, which is a sad state of affairs. Some of those need the money to pay for their phone and Internet usage, which keeps them up even later once they get home. The deputy head has discovered that students struggling at school are invariably spending two or three hours a night online, sometimes longer. This is not just exhausting. It also strikes me as lonely, spending so much time with friends who may or may not exist.

  Orwell’s book is a chilling study of a world deprived of language and memory. His vision of the future is in many ways an account of our present. Our public vocabulary is shrinking as so much conversation has become an exchange of clichés. The very use of the word excellence, for example, has become a sign of mediocrity. The culture we are part of is shifting from one based on memory to one based on retention. The difference is this. If you take twenty dollars out of an ATM, that little factoid will be retained for all eternity in the bowels of some machine. But if you then take the twenty dollars and buy some flowers for your beloved, a gesture of reconciliation or renewal or fondess or hope, the flutter in your heart can only be remembered by you and the person close enough to feel those exquisite little vibrations. It can’t be retained. Memory is a human art, part of a relationship. Retention is a form of management. The devolution from a memory culture to a retention culture is an understandable way of coping with the sheer excess that is exhausting us all. But it is sad. The word exhaustion has its roots in the Latin haustus, which means a drawing of water and, by association, a drink. Exhaustion is the drought of the soul. It is a parched land.

  The capacity for memory and language are both formed in sleep. All our lives, memory and language are consolidated in sleep. A culture that doesn’t sleep properly uses more words to say less and has less capacity to remember. It may provide plenty of exhausting stimulation to distract us from our real needs. It may want us to live like bees in a bottle. But take a minute to look at a bee in the open air hovering over a flower. Observe the art of its stillness. This is when the bee is creative.

  In Nineteen Eighty-Four, one character, O’Brien, a party member who seems for a time to offer a ray of hope to the depressed hero, Winston Smith, says to Smith, “We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.” Smith is uplifted by these words and sustained by them. But it turns out that the place where there is no dark is a vision of hell. It is the Ministry of Love, a vast windowless bunker operated by the Thought Police where torture and brutality take place. It is a place of despair and inhumanity. The lights are never turned out. Darkness would have been a mercy.

  It concerns me that the young people I teach are growing up in a world of blinding light. They spend hours looking into little screens. Consider this difference. When you read something on a screen, such as on a computer, you are looking into a source of light. Light triggers various things in the brain, among them the creation of cortisol, the stress hormone, in the adrenal gland. On the other hand, if you read text in a book, you are looking at black ink. This has the opposite effect in the brain. Darkness facilitates the release of melatonin from the pineal gland. In some ways, melatonin does the opposite of cortisol: it is the hormone that urges calm, the one that regulates the circadian rhythm and helps the central nervous system not to go into overload. This is why reading a book in bed before going to sleep is a physically different experience from sitting up against the pillows with your laptop. Different hormones are called out to play. Cortisol is a good and necessary thing in its place. But we need breaks from it as well. Students who spend their lives looking at screens as opposed to books are learning in a more stressful environment. I have no idea why schools encourage this.

  I tell my students that I prefer them to submit handwritten work. It’s not that I want to make plagiarism more difficult. It’s not even that, if they work on the computer, I have no idea if they can spell or not. It’s really because I want them to have a closer relationship with their own work. I’d like to restrict access to the stress on which the world expects them to become addicted. They look at me like I’ve come from another planet.

  “Benny, I think we need to finish the story now and go to sleep.”

  “No.”

  “Benny, it’s time to put out the light.”

  “No. No.”

  “Benny. You’ve told us a beautiful story, but it’s time for sleep

  now.”

  “But, Daddy!”

  “No buts, Benny.”

  “But daddy, we’re only up to the ending.”

  We’re late to bed because it’s a Friday night at the end of January and the summer holidays here in Australia are almost over and the peach tree out back is so heavy with fruit that the branches have bowed to the ground and we are wondering if the branches will snap before their load ripens. The passionfruit are ripe and the plums are perfect: the color of night on the outside and of the sunset on the inside. Benny (now four and a half) wants to lead a pirate expedition again; he calls himself Captain Orders, which means Jacob (two and a half) and Clare (still two minutes younger than Jacob) have to do what he says, although Clare wants to take off her clothes and climb the peach tree in the nude and Jacob has gone off to find his telescope, perhaps to check on what’s up in the tree. There’s no reason in the world to go inside except that the longer we put it off, the harder it gets. The students will be back at school on Monday after the long break, and I have to teach a novel I haven’t read yet, so I want the kids in bed. But I also don’t want this moment to end. I am wishing the time away at the same time as hoping it will last forever.

  It’s hard work to conjure sleep when the kids’ imaginations are in flood. We manage to find room for them in the bath around a flotilla of pirate ships. Clare decides to give her Dorothy the Dinosaur a bath but then refuses to go to bed without her, so Dorothy has to be wrapped in three diapers so that she won’t soak the bed and this means finding pink safety pins, as nothing else will be acceptable in Clare’s pink princess bed. Two feet away, Jacob won’t go to bed without a treasure map and one of his pirate books. He wants the little book but we can’t find it, so he agrees to have the big one with pop-up pictures.

  In the bunk on top of Jacob, Benny is worried. He’s a concentrated version of his old man. I see my own anxiety in my little boy and worry about it. Tomorrow Benny is having a friend stay the night, the first time he has hosted a sleepover. It is a huge thing in his life. For the umpteenth time, we go through the arrangements. Clare will be coming into our room, which we have made to sound like a treat for her despite the fact she always ends up there at some time anyway. She will start the night tomorrow in our room in a special makeshift princess bed, every detail of which she has personally approved, including which side of the pillow will be facing upward, leaving us with the question of where she will go on her nocturnal wanderings when she hasn’t got us as a destination. In the meantime, Benny has rung his friend Bobby to check what pajamas he will be bringing (Lightning McQueen) and to make sure he remembers his toothbrush (Buzz Lightyear) and swimming costume (which has a surfing dog on it). Bobby will be sleeping in Clare’s bed and Benny needs reassurance once again that every trace of princess habitation will be expunged to be replaced by his old Buzz Lightyear p
illow case, which won’t match Bobby’s pajamas but will at least match his toothbrush, which, if he wants to, Bobby can put on the window sill.

  “How does a star fall softly?” asks Clare out of nowhere.

  “That’s a good question,” replies Benny in an adult voice. “It means it lands on soft grass or soft weeds or a pillow someone has put out for it.”

  Clare is satisfied with this.

  It’s a hot night. Benny wants a fan. Jacob doesn’t. Clare just wants to take off her clothes again and get back up in the peach tree. We whisper to Benny that we will bring in the fan when Jacob has fallen asleep. He likes this idea; it’s a conspiracy. We read Peter Pan’s Snow Adventure, a chastening tale of Captain Hook on ice. Then I tell a made-up story about Captain Hook, Cowboy Benny, and the Pink Princess in which Hook takes his ship up a long river to visit first a castle where he puts up a hook for the princess to hang her gown and then a wild west saloon where he puts up a hook for cowboy Benny to hang his hat when he goes to sleep, which, the storyteller prompts, should be right about now.

  Mummy kisses good night. Daddy brings in his sitting chair from the kitchen. The lights go out.

  Jacob starts crying.

  Benny starts calling for Mummy. There is something else he needs to know about Bobby’s sleeping arrangements for tomorrow.

  Clare has tossed Dorothy out of the princess bed for being wet.

  Now both boys are crying.

  Clare rotates through 180 degrees, then back the other way through 90, then around again another 270. This is how she searches for sleep, turning and turning on the mattress like a ballet dancer until she nods off. The noise of the boys in the room ebbs and flows like waves on the beach; it builds to a crescendo then softens then comes rushing back over the sand. I try not to get cranky and tell them to be quiet because I’m going to write this in a book and I want them to read it later and think I was a gentle daddy who never lost his patience, least of all at ten o’clock when he has a novel to read for school. So I sit there, tense and rigid, as the noise bangs about my head.