O’Sullivan and his humorless cronies are just the latest incarnation of our abstemious church fathers, who held it a sin to sink into the friendly pillowing of sleep, in which every living thing delights. Sleep, they taught, is the dross of souls rejected by God, who chews us up en masse, strains the juices through his baleen, and spits out the crud. “The damned will stay in hell as broth and yeast,” says Luther. Sleep is that broth, that yeast.
Of course, sleep is literally both broth (add water) and yeast: a few grains of it scattered over warm, honey-fattened water will bewitch bread into a fantasia of dough turrets, minarets, grottos, candelabras, and credenzas, now sadly out of culinary fashion, but still traditional at Sleepmastide. Its flavor is unremarkable, though children love it, but I find it has a mild intoxicating effect, albeit short-lived. The taste is reminiscent of cardamom, with an incongruous hint of spearmint. A few grains on the tongue will calm a fretful baby; cooked up and injected, its effects are stronger but still mellow, hence its reputation as a drug for hippies and beginners, though it is probably more frequently taken by users of all descriptions than this reputation would suggest.
Exotic varieties of sleep, named for the region in which they’re gathered, are popularly believed to have special qualities, though scientists say there is no significant difference between these and our domestic sleep. My private investigations (the wayward probings of a curious mind) have brought me to the same conclusion. These rare strains of sleep are some countries’ biggest cash crop, so their governments turn a blind eye to the traffic, and are not very hospitable to foreign scientists who want to test on-site the exaggerated claims that circulate about the properties of the sleep when fresh.
There are gnostic teachings of another sleep, the opposite in every respect of our sunny everyday sleep. One reads of a dark, greasy, subterranean sleep, which seeps out of solid rock and hardens into strange fungal forms, and plugs underground rivers with a glassy but flexible mass that can be reliquefied by one blow of a pickax. Miners have staggered out of shafts and told tales of slow-motion tsunamis of sour treacle. Do not sample this sleep, they say; it will spoil your appetite for every other thing. Nevertheless, I cannot help wishing that someday I will be given a chance to taste it. I love sleep, I confess, and as I watch the grains fall slowly outside the window, I think how lucky we are. Into our difficult lives this surplus falls. This gift.
I have not mentioned the greatest consolation sleep grants us. At the proper time and with the proper ceremonies, you may make yourself a substitute out of sleep. How to do it must be writ in our genes. I watched my children miming it in sandboxes; like birds building nests, they needed no tutors. You may fail at every other endeavor, but you will not fail at this one. Even the clumsiest become deft and knowing as they pat and roll the golden column, persuading it into human form.
This substitute or scapegoat is legally empowered to act as a person in your stead. Your substitute can vote for you, take a test or a beating, deliver a public speech, perform the marital duties, or commit suicide for you. Politicians are all substitutes, as are firemen, astronauts, and most people forced to make public apologies, but substitutes are often made for sadder, more personal reasons. I have watched friends grow ever more restless and unhappy, until one day the complaining stops, and I know they have gone to start a new life and left this diplomat behind. We say they are “dreaming.” I am happy for them in their bright new world.
My children are already dreaming. So young! At their age I kept telling myself, A better time will come. I can endure this moment. And when the next moment came, I found I could endure that one too, and so on, to this day. But I don’t think less of them for making their escape. We are all waiting for our chance. Out of care and duty leaps the shocking blossom of the new: vibrant, imperious, reeking of pollen. It is a subpoena, a lure, a gauntlet. If we are honest and brave we have little choice: we kick over our happy home and go. We step out of the airplane onto a golden cloud.
It is a terrible thing when it is the substitute that is sent to find a new life, a sign that a person yearns for change but cannot imagine creating it herself. The irony is that her failure of imagination marks her proxy, too. When you see someone creeping through life, as if everything in the world were new, yes, but in its newness an assault, she is sure to be one of these.
An action is in the works to protect the rights of substitutes. It is bound to fail, because the substitutes themselves show no interest in it; the meetings of the Substitutes’ Union are all attended by solicitous originals who—in an odd reversal—are empowered to vote for their substitutes! These good-hearted citizens betray a basic confusion about the existential condition of the substitutes. If scapegoats feel pain, it is only the delegated pain of their originals.
Use your substitute well: you will not get another. If you use it too early—to feign a teen suicide, maybe, or escape the school bully—you must live out your own life from then on, and that is a hard, lonely prospect. People who use their substitutes frivolously find that they have given all their frivolity away, and are compelled to be serious characters from then on, while their substitute dutifully practices dissolution.
Eventually, of course, the substitute has suffered enough knocks that it no longer looks quite human. Dents alter the form little by little; scratches expose the waxy interior.
It is the originals’ responsibility to lay their substitutes to rest when this time comes, but not surprisingly, they often fail to take this in hand. (Those battered pawns we’ve all seen staggering around are a civic disgrace.) When the original is ill or badly hurt, on the other hand, the substitute’s pupils turn white, while if the original should die, the substitute falls in its tracks and turns to sleep again, sifting out of the sleeves and collar. This can be a brutal shock to family members who did not know their loved one was a substitute.
If an enterprising person is standing by, this sleep can be patted together again; it is the only time a person can make a second substitute. These secondary substitutes, lit as it were on the embers of the one before, have certain specific defects that do not vary: they cannot enunciate the consonants d or t, they cannot create nested sentence structures, they are color-blind, and they have recurring nightmares of spiral forms and infinitely mounting abstract quantities.
No substitutes can have children, in the usual run of things, although they make kind, responsible parents. A substitute wife can become “pregnant” and in due course deliver a waxy figurine, but this baby will not move or cry, since it has no original and is not a true substitute.
There is a mystical tradition that if two substitutes fall in love (true love must be specified, for many marriages are made up of a pair of substitutes, in fact nothing is more common), their child has a fifty-fifty chance of being an original. If such a child is born, and reality thus springs from the loins of artifice, then all people will fall to their knees before it. It will be the living god, and this can be proved by conjuring it to make a substitute for itself. The sleep will fall apart in the child’s hands: the real Original can have no substitutes.
Last night I lay awake, and in one of the thousand insomniac hours before dawn I switched on a lamp. A fine scar on my wife’s eyelid caught the light and gleamed like a gold thread. I turned back the sheets, I examined her entire body, and I found incontrovertible proof. My wife is a substitute. As I got out of bed, she mumbled something and reached for me. I touched her hand and saw her smile into the pillow.
I am not shocked. Is that dreadful? She could not endure the demands of our love and she left. I understand this as I have understood other surprises she has given me in the past. I feel lonely, and yet in a curious sense there is something right about this. I have spent my life in adoration of sleep. I may have loved it better—more carefully, more knowledgeably—than I’ve loved the people in my life. Its beauty, its mystery. The evidence it bears of a universe capable of mercy. Now when I say I love sleep, I can also say I love nothing else. Everythi
ng I love is made of it.
The sleep is falling steadily. I could go out and gather it. I could pat it together. My hands would know what to do. I used to be a pilot, did I mention that? I would like to make one more flight. This time I would not let my chance go by.
I could leave my life. I could change completely. Is it time?
BLOOD
It wasn’t steady work, no, no more than once a month, and then it was terrible hard work for a few days. But the pay was good. I can’t complain. It was a sight better than singing “Mother, Is the Battle Over?” at the crossroads and plying my broom before the gentlemen and ladies—I was always more clever than pretty, and made less for all my winking and scraping than the other girls did just sitting there. I thank my stars for the night I fell in behind the blood wagon; I made myself such a pestilential bother with asking questions that Scratch Jill finally took me on as apprentice and I never missed a period the next twenty year. I was a devil for working. I worked on the docks in between, though I needn’t have and some like me didn’t, but just lazed around until the monthly came again.
My informant is a hale woman in her forties, robust, with a head of ginger hair untidily seamed with white. She wears a gentleman’s tweed coat with bone buttons over her simple gown of green stuff, and sports a man’s hat rather than a bonnet. The effect is not without dignity, for she carries herself well, and her unconventional costume seems to be a matter of preference rather than necessity, as her income is adequate to her needs. She is unmarried, and counts herself lucky to have been employed as a swabber in the now obsolete blood pipes. The city pensioned her at an early age when it modernized the drainage system, but she still takes odd jobs. She keeps to herself. Her life has not always been so sedate, but now she prides herself on keeping up her home, which while small is neat and well-appointed. Only over a pint does she relax and allow herself to expand about the old times.
She has stopped her account and now stares for long moments into the yeasty depths of her pint glass. Who knows what she sees there? I have no doubt that her life has been hard, but only at such moments does her manner reveal any discontent. It is quickly shaken off, however, and her narrative is picked up again.
Out in the country they let it come up wherever it pleases. Well, they can’t stop it, can they? My sister lives in Kent. Once a month the blood wells up in the cow prints. Perfect little cups of it, she says they are, and make a pretty trail through the cowslips. Blood runs down the bark of trees, why I don’t know, maybe the roots drink it in below, and it comes out above. It fills the ruts and runs between the cabbages. Why make a fuss about it, my sister wants to know. It helps the plants grow, is what they say, and does no harm to animals either, and even humans will take a nip on the sly, for the power it is said to have to bring true dreams of love and put a powerful charm of attraction on the drinker.
Whether it brings love to them as drinks it I don’t know. It brought love to me, but I was soaked in it from top to toe every month for twenty year. But Sally is gone now, and I don’t care to speak of her.
I was a blood-lark, yes, that’s what they called us back then. We wasn’t pretty, we was a sight to strike fear into the hearts of men, or women, and I won’t say we didn’t take some pleasure in that, rollicking down the street gin-drunk (they always allowed us a tipple on the job to keep our spirits up; it was hard work, and dirty) heading home at five in the morning in our red coats dripping for all we had squeezed them out into the cart. And singing one of our carols, which were that tuneful, I still find myself humming them, though not one woman in a hundred could join in, for they’re forgotten now. But I won’t sing one, and you oughtn’t to ask. The words would bring up your green bile, if you wasn’t used to them, most people being able to handle blood on its own, or lewdness, but the combination being a mite strong for them. Now it’s not such a jolly profession, now they do things proper and they’ve got the machines.
Oh, I wouldn’t go back to the old ways, I’m not saying that, just that we had good times and we was always helpful with one another, and indeed we had to be, stuck up to our necks or our ankles depending on which way about we went in, mucking out the blood by main strength if we was in a hurry, or for those as took life more sanguine, just lying and soaking it up slow in our napkin coats. Sanitaries, they called them, but I don’t know that they were all that sanitary. Of course, they called them that to have a way to refer to them with gentlefolk, like the ladies what took such an interest in our little ones, the tiddlers we employed back then to swab out the smallest holes. Tiddlers? Children, I mean. Sent them up into the tight spots with cotton balls clenched in their teeth, we did, and pinched their toes if they were slow about it, but we was gentle with them, if they didn’t argue too much, and they mostly didn’t, you see, because they knew we would drop them in the drink if they did, and they were scared of the blood.
That wears off. Blood is blood, for us as have to wade in it and make our living off it, and it’s bonny stuff once you get over being squeamish. There’s no place for squeamish girls, not in our trade; we threw ‘em right in the catch, heels over head, and had a good laugh, too, while they pulled themselves out, for there isn’t a dimity handkerchief in the world what could mop up that mess. Bonny? Yes, that’s what I said. Isn’t it the very soul of red?
I suppose there was a time the blood came up in the city same as everywhere else. But I don’t know when that was. As far back at least as the Romans they was devising ways to keep it away from the city, let it flow as strong as it likes elsewhere. They had lead pipes, and aqueducts, and they sank wells and flushed the gutters with buckets of water and these methods didn’t change much for oh, hundreds on hundreds of years, and I suppose they worked well enough, but people was always trying to come up with new ways to draw off the blood and send it somewhere else, the men being most especially particular about it, not having the feel for the blood that women do, and not thinking it right to turn the faucet once a month or work the pump and it runs red, or winch the bucket up and find it brimming with blood. And it’s true enough that it is not the stuff to be washing the fine linens in nor to water a delicate wine, though as it only comes once monthly I’d not bother about it if it was up to me.
So here in England they dug and tunneled under London and fashioned the wells and the catches and what all, what were the wonder of the modern world and ain’t matched even yet in poorer countries. All the little veins collected the blood and ran it down into the catches and that more or less kept it from rising up in the streets like it used to do, though you could still see beads of blood in city gardens in the morning, for you can’t keep the earth from doing what the earth must, and I for one don’t want to. Yes, it still come up and pinked the water from the tap and beaded between bricks and cobblestones and trickled down gutters, but most of it was caught in the big catches the little veins run into.
They couldn’t just leave it there. Oh, no. Blood does scab, don’t it, though the monthly scabs blessedly slow, without which fact we would be scab pickers not swabbers, and I for one thank my stars. Still, if they left it puddling there in the catch, even granted they flush the streets and the buildings and let the runoff go in the catch and water it thin, in a month’s time the catch would be one solid scab, like in the scab mines out east, but no use to anyone without a thousand years go by to press it hard and turn it to carbuncles, and meanwhile a more notable problem is the blood next time has no place to run to, all the catches being clogged.
I explain all this because I don’t know if you know it, and one day all this knowledge will be gone along with us who done the work. Already Little Tam is dead, and Camilla the C**t, and Red Rose, and Singsong Sally—we called her that, sir, because my Sal was always singing, down in the pipes, and an eerie sound it was to have float up from a hell red hole. And I hear Long Arm Lunnie is only just hanging on, and raving about the catches and the swabs and the napkins, and only a few of us able to know what she’s talking about, and she younger th
an me; and all the little blood-larks who came on after me and who I helped to train and pricked their heels to send ‘em into the pipes when they was reluctant, they’re all grown women now with little ones of their own and don’t want to remember what they done before.
What did they do? Well, isn’t it obvious? Someone had to go down and clean out all that blood. In some parts of town you can still see the hatches, and I believe there’s unfortunate folk now living in some of the catches they overlooked when they went around walling ’em up. The city called them manholes, same as the other kind, but we right off renamed them lady-holes, that being the cleanest version of the name I can report to you, sir, and that was because we was almost all women who did the work, women being small-boned and, as I said, less inclined to get funny about the blood, but going about the work practical and easy with one another.
We marched off to work whenever we got called, though most of us could sniff out when a period was coming after just a few months on the job, we had such a feel for it. How did we tell? It’s hard to say, we just knew, that’s all; everyone got a little queerish right before, and especially when it was late coming, then all at once the whole city relaxed, and that’s when we got out our poles and our climbing boots. They never called us out before dark, they had some idea that nobody was to know when it was bleeding, that it would upset people of refinement. Whether that was true or not, we never made much secret of it and went to work singing blood carols like I said, and pass the gin, because we was happy to see each other again and happy to be working, the money often running thin enough by the time the next period came. Sometimes we hitched a ride in the swaddling cart, sunk in the mounds of stained batting.
The Melancholy of Anatomy: Stories Page 11