The Insomnia Museum

by Laurie Canciani

  The woman’s room was lit weakly by the day that pressed its face against the window. The dust rose silver. The stain from yesterday was still sopped into the fibres of the carpet beneath her feet. The room smelled different but she didn’t know why. It was hot. Musty. She swore in her head because Dorothy told her to.

  The woman was sitting up in bed with the dirty sheets wrapped around her waist and she was scratching the white paint off the wooden windowsill. She couldn’t see her face because she was turned wholly towards her work but she could see her back that was bare and long and pale down to the place that was covered by the sheets. She balanced the hot cup between her hands as she had done the day before. She stood in the doorway and looked at the woman and the woman kept on scratching and she collected snowflakes beneath her nails and drew crooked lines in the wood. The sheet fell to her hips. Between her shoulder blades was the most beautiful place she had ever seen.

  I know you’re there, the woman said.

  I’m sorry, I didn’t mean.

  I’m writing my name. Can you see that?

  I can’t read your name.

  Why not?

  I just can’t.

  Are you stupid?

  I don’t think so.

  You probably are.

  I made you some tea.

  The woman turned around and the sheet rolled around her waist and she rested her back against the wall and uncovered her breasts.

  Where’s Lucky? the woman said. Tell him to come to bed.

  She balanced the cup on the woman’s palm and went into her pocket for the note and she pulled it out and held it up for the woman to see and then slipped it into her pocket again. The woman blew the steam from the cup and said it looks like he’s abandoned us both. He’s gone out to do Dog’s work. That’s my name for God. It’s just God spelled backwards, don’t you know? Everyone knows that. Everyone thinks it too. Dog. Dog. Holy Dog. Lucky’s off helping poor people feel even more guilty and ashamed than usual. Do you think that’s a cruel thing to say?

  I don’t think anything about anything.

  You do. I can tell from looking at you. You think a lot of things.

  He’ll be back.

  One day he won’t.

  I think you’re wrong.

  Think what you like.

  She drank her tea and blew the paint from beneath her nails and she looked at her from the bed and churned her up in her eyes. She looked all the way down to her legs and she lifted the hem of her shorts to her thighs and lifted her arms and she drank more of her tea.

  You’re supposed to shave your legs. Didn’t you know that? You’re supposed to shave your legs and under your arms. You’re supposed to shave your pussy too but that’s up to the man who strips you every night. That’s what a woman is supposed to do. Shave there and there and play dumb and moody or no boys will want to touch you. Your nose is too big. Did you know that? Your breasts are too small. I could twist them and squeeze them right off like little grapes. How old are you?

  Seventeen.

  You look twelve.

  I know.

  The woman gave her the cup and she took it and lowered it on a table and looked down at her own legs and thought on Lucky and his lovely ugly love. The woman pulled a green packet from beneath her pillow and she untwisted the top and pulled out a stack of tiny white papers and a red plastic lighter and a pinch of loose tobacco. She took one of the papers and more tobacco that she bunched on top and she rolled the paper around and around in her pretty fingers. She licked the end of the paper and rolled it together until it was a cigarette and then she put it into her mouth and lit the end and smoked it. She scratched the blue heart on her shoulder. She propped her elbow on a pillow and looked at her and held the made-up smoke high and threw her head back to blow all the smoke into the air.

  I used to be an artist, she said. Can you tell?

  I can’t tell much about anyone.

  You’ll learn. It’s all in the eyes and fingers. What are you supposed to be?

  I didn’t know I had to be anything.

  That’s a shame.

  Why?

  You have to be something. That’s just life. You have to be someone and you have to do something. You have to follow the living path. Make plans. Fuck about. Make regrets. Who wants to just exist? Who wants to live and die and be forgotten? That’s why people have goals and dreams. People spend their whole lives trying to be something else. If you’re not something you’re nothing.

  You have to go to sleep to dream and I don’t sleep that much.

  I don’t understand you.

  They were silent again, both of them looking at the window, at the sky turning cloudier and darker and the rain picking and the concrete blocks getting drenched and all the wetness darkening the concrete and all the lights that were beginning to come on and show up all the faces that lived over there. Between the sky and the dirt.

  Don’t you just hate artificial light? the woman said. I hate the way it looks and the way it makes me feel when I see it. It makes me feel sick. It turns everything to oranges and lemons. I hate the way everyone tries to replace what’s already outside. It’s ugly. It’s like giving birth to a limbless doll. A stillborn. Out there there’s nothing but stillborn lights in stillborn houses with stillborn wallpaper and stillborn shoes with clean rubber soles. You want to smoke?

  She nodded and the woman made another rolled smoke in her lap and handed it over and lit it in her mouth and they both smoked together. Dog bless you, she said, and laughed. She lay back in the bed with her breasts peeping out and then she covered herself with the sheet.

  Are you another of his broken birds?

  I don’t know what that means.

  You must be. I can tell just by looking at you. You’re broken up about something and you need fixing and that’s what he’s going to try to do with you. He’ll give you all the love and care and attention you can take for a few seconds of your life and it will be wonderful and you won’t want it to end but it will. Sooner than you know. He’ll take himself away again. Better to stay broken I say.

  Why do people need help?

  Watch the news. Take a walk. Open your eyes.

  Do you and him. I think. Do you love each other?

  The woman looked at her. Her skin smelled like ash. She didn’t speak. She looked deeply at her without moving. The smell from a breakfast she would never eat seeped through the window that was jammed open with a folded piece of cardboard. The woman doglooked her and then she brought her hand to her face and began to laugh quietly. Then she closed her mouth and stared at her own knees that had become unmasked beneath the sheets and drawn up to her chest.

  She waited in the room but there was nothing more to say and nothing more to laugh on. She pulled the sheet over the woman to the shoulders and tucked it around her as Dad used to when the house was too cold to sleep in. The woman didn’t take her eyes from the plain wall on the other end of the room. Before she had moved to the bedroom door and wrapped her ugly fingers around the handle and opened and closed the door behind her the woman spoke once more.

  Has he told you why people call him Lucky?

  She turned around and the woman was looking at her. She took another puff of the cigarette she held in her fingers and there was this little glow that lit her face for the smallest of moments before she shrank into the clouds and dust and the ugly artificial light once again.

  She shook her head.

  The woman turned her face back to the wall and said nothing more. She was gone into the writing there that she couldn’t read or see. She waited for an answer or a nod or a movement of the body that didn’t come and then she left the room and closed the door and shut the woman away from the rest of the world. Only Lucky and Dorothy and that Dog in heaven would be able to bring her back from wherever she had gone.

  19

  Hey Dee Dee

  SHE DIDN’T LIKE herself when she was alone.

  She liked who she was with him. Pretty. Good.
Funny. Kind. Kinder. Honest. Lipsticked. Green glassed. Worthy of. Different. So different that he looked deeply at her when he thought she wasn’t watching and talked to her for hours and hours until there was nothing but eating or sleeping or listening to the sounds of living through the open windows of parked cars. It had been hours and he hadn’t come back. Not yet.

  The woman in bed was singing rude songs and demanding company in the other room but she had closed the door and she didn’t want to go back there again. She went into the living room to smoke and not think.

  She looked out of the window at the tower on the other side of the world that was full up with faces and lives all lined side by side and praying to the barking God. Dog. She wanted to see them better so she turned on the kitchen light but when she looked into the glass again all she saw was her own face looking back into the room. That’s all she ever saw. She was hungry. It was dark.

  I think we should watch a video, she said to Plastic Jesus.

  He looked at her and bobbed his head.

  She went into the bedroom that she decided was hers and she fetched her video from the pile of books that she had shaped into stacks and she looked at it in the light that hung in rows in the hall. Dorothy stared up from the front of the video box.

  She brought the film and Plastic Jesus into the living room that was clean and empty as though it had only been lived in for a few hours or days and no longer than that. She couldn’t tell what colour the walls were. They were a shade before colour. A shade to which normally colour is applied. Clay or that grey-brown shade made by rolling too many bright strips of Plasticine together. Like Dorothy’s world before she steps out into that other place all done up like a rabbit dream.

  There were no carpets or mats in the room. There was only a hard wooden floor with black stains and tea rings and it collected all the cold and it creaked and moaned when she walked across it. Beneath the window was a settee and it was broken the same way Dad’s had been. Next to the settee there was a small table with one leg missing.

  She closed the door and pulled the TV away from the wall as much as she could without dragging the cables too far and she looked at the little video player on the shelf beneath it. The TV was skinny and the player was flat and there was no room for people in one and no room for videos in the other. She looked at it for a long time. Looked at Dorothy who grinned from the front cover so happy and daft, looking at something she couldn’t see. She poked a button and then another and a lip came slowly out of the middle. It was thin. Small. It had space only for something round and flat. She felt it with her fingers and looked at her video again. It wasn’t the right shape or size for her film. She pushed the lip back in. Dorothy shouted curses from the yellow side of the room.

  She couldn’t play her video. This was not her home. She cried for herself and cried for Dorothy and cried for Dad who had been shoved into a box by the new front door. The woman in the bed shouted shut the fuck up and she wiped her eyes and looked at the blank TV and didn’t make another sound. She smoked. Next to the small player there was a stack of films but the boxes were too small to hold videos and when she opened them up she saw only CDs with shiny silver faces and writing that she couldn’t read. She took a CD out of the box and looked at it and went back to the video player that wasn’t a video player and she pressed the button for the lip to come out and when it did she lay the disc down and pressed the button and sent the lip back again. The TV flashed and turned on. The screen was green and bright. The film from the box played on the screen and she watched it and blew smoke and waited for Lucky to find her there.

  The film was good. Funny. Different. She hated it.

  She turned the TV off. Outside of the window in the living room was a concrete balcony with a column and a rusted metal pole and a little light that came on whenever something walked past it or the wind caught it wrong. There was a man. It flashed on. There was a bird. It flashed on. There was a black cat and it sprang onto the wall opposite the window and watched the light and bent its unblinking face and flicked its tail and then looked through the window where she was sitting looking out. She looked at the cat. It couldn’t see her in the room. She came to the window and rested her hands on the cold glass and watched the little thing while it played and rested. It looked at the window and then it looked at the ground and balanced on its paws and raised its back. She came back into the room and watched another film and the mad clock in the other room banged its head and told her that the hour was fifteen.

  Cats are things that hunt, Dad said in her head.

  What do they hunt?

  Whatever they want to eat.

  Can we have a cat?

  No.

  Why?

  Remember the fish.

  She was thinking of Lucky when she saw the shadow moving on the balcony outside and heard the sound of someone coughing. The TV faded between two scenes and a cartoon mouse preached about family underneath a falling heavy boot. That’s just life. She went into her pocket and twisted the lipstick up and used the green glow from the TV and her reflection in the black window to draw the red fat lines on her mouth. She closed her eyes and listened to the sound of the key clicking in the door and she pressed her lips together and waited for the ugly love to spread into the room.

  She opened her eyes. A boy stood by the frame of the door. He wasn’t Lucky. He was a boy. Not a dark visitor with a noose in his fist and dogs snapping around his ankles but a short boy with blond hair stuck into a knife-edge above his head. He wore baggy jeans turned up above his ankles held up by red braces and boots that spilled their tongues and twisted their laces around and around. Dark eyebrows. Bitten lips. A boy. He had a picture of Plastic Jesus on his tee shirt with big fat red lines running through and writing she couldn’t read just above that. He twisted the keys in his hand and looked at her with little eyes that shone bright in the TV glow. His mouth was open. She could see the shine of something silver that covered his teeth in lines and she could feel his eyes wandering down and then up and she brought her hand to her mouth and wiped the lipstick away.

  You’re not Lucky, she said.

  The boy slipped the keys into his jacket and stood still with rainwater dripping off his cheeks and off the end of his freckled nose. He made little noises and twitched the corners of his mouth and jerked his chin and head this way and then the other way and his body twitched too, strange and uncontrolled in the glowing hall.

  Are you making fun of me? she said.

  No. I can’t help it.

  I don’t believe you.

  It’s true. I can’t help doing it.

  If you wanted to stop doing something you could.

  Not this.

  Who are you?

  I live here. I’m Tick.

  Tick is a funny name.

  My real name is.

  That’s worse.

  I know.

  The boy looked at her. He brought the keys back out of his pocket and played with them in his hands and jerked his chin again. He wiped his face with the sleeves of his jacket and clenched his jaw and relaxed it again. She couldn’t hear anything on the outside of the front door. The little noises and movements the boy made kept her in the living room and out of her own head. She watched him like TV. When he talked his teeth shone like treasure.

  What school do you go to? he said.

  I don’t go to any school.

  Cool. I wish I didn’t have to go.

  I think I’m too old.

  How old are you?

  Seventeen.

  You look my age.

  How old are you?

  Thirteen.

  He stepped into the room and she stepped back to the corner and didn’t take her eye from him. She had never seen a boy before. His eyes pulsed big and black like the eyes of her father and his hair was the same shade of wheat as Lucky’s and his mouth was just like the woman in the bed, slim and curved upwards. The blue-green-orange-yellow neon light had come on again on the outside and it shone
through the little slit in the letterbox. In another room the cuckoo barked like a dog. It was the hour fifteen. Again. She looked at the stolen shoes on her feet. It was the hour fifteen. Time had not moved an inch.

  He stood and looked at her where she had brought herself to stand closer with her arms folded over her chest. She looked at him and he looked at her and his mouth was open and she could see the shine of the silver cable that lined his funny little teeth. He didn’t doglook her. Not even once.

  Who are you then? he said.

  Anna. I came from. I live here.

  I live here too.

  Lucky said you hadn’t come home in ages.

  He tried to stop me from going out last time so I decided to punish him. I do whatever I want when I want to do it. I’m in charge of myself. When someone tells me not to do something I deliberately do it. They can’t stop me.

  She thought on this. The boy rubbed the tracks on his teeth with his tongue.

  Lucky brought me here, she said.

  He jerked his head to the left and flicked his jaw and thumped himself in the leg and made a whooping noise. He took something from his pocket that was flat as a cigarette paper and wrapped in foil and he opened the foil and took out whatever was inside and threw the foil on the floor and shoved the thing in his mouth and chewed it. The boy didn’t speak. He looked at her for a while and when he was done with that he walked towards her and then went past her and as he passed he laid one of the foil sweeties into her hand and went off into the kitchen without saying anything else.

  She opened the packet and smelled the sweet. It smelled like toothpaste. Sugar. Lemon. She folded it into her mouth and rolled the foil into a ball and flicked it onto the floor next to Plastic Jesus who was still bobbing with the affirmations of before. In the kitchen the boy was singing and clattering and he made so much noise she couldn’t think on her mother or father or the moths or the black bags or the creaking face of Plastic Jesus or the bad mood bird or anything else that was clinging to the roots inside her head. She thought of nothing. She was empty.