Salt Slow Read online

  You don’t notice the way a city breathes until it changes its sleeping habits. Looking downwards, you could see it – the restlessness of asphalt. I took to watching from my window for the heave of sundown, the roll and shrug of something searching for a comfortable way to lie. My brother rang, on his way to an audition which had been rescheduled for two in the morning – an early example of what would become the fairly common practice of ‘repurposing the night’.

  ‘We’re all awake anyway, so why not use the time,’ he said, voice blurry from his warm-up exercises. I listened to him run through his audition piece, covering my mouth to stifle a yawn. After he hung up, I leant far out of my window and watched a gang of small girls from the building playing football in the street. Their Sleeps ran alongside them, sticking out unsporting legs and yanking at their ponytails. I listened to their shouts with the night heavy on my eyelids, the whole world hushed and hot beyond my windowsill.

  Leonie took to knocking for me at midnight; little Bastille knocks which I answered in the languid way I now did everything, sometimes setting a pot of coffee to brew before I came to the door. Perhaps in a bid to lure her Sleep out into the open, she had put away her old nightclothes and usually came over in soft blue jeans and work shirts. She was a writer, she told me, she wrote an agony column for a newspaper I sometimes read. She had an over-caffeinated rattle about her, a slight panic to her widened eyes that begged me not to ask if she was feeling tired. Now and then, I would catch her staring enviously at my Sleep, unconsciously mimicking its gestures. She was tired of tiredness, she told me. She was tired of feeling left out.

  We quickly developed a sort of routine, in the same way that we knew many people in our building had begun to arrange their night-times. A woman who lived on the ground floor had taken to walking her Sleep around the park every night in what we saw as a vain attempt to tire it out. A cellist who lived in the flat directly above me had put together a nightly chamber group along with a viola player who lived on the second floor and the couple from the penthouse, both of whom were apparently amateur violinists. Leonie and I met at midnight, usually in my flat, as she didn’t like the way my Sleep would rummage through her books. We did nothing very momentous together – we ate mustard on toast and listened to late-night radio, played solitaire and read our horoscopes and the palms of one another’s hands. Sometimes, she brought fragments of her work over and sat on the floor with her back against the sofa, reading me letters the paper had sent her to answer, determinedly suppressing her yawns.

  ‘Listen to this one,’ was her usual refrain, affecting the voices of her letter-writers. A teenage girl who was too shy to masturbate with her Sleep watching. A university student whose Sleep stood in front of the door in the mornings and made it impossible to go to class. A man who complained that his wife had a Sleep and he didn’t – a situation which he felt undermined his standing in the relationship. This last Leonie read aloud with her tongue pressed downwards, in a voice which dripped contempt but left her face impassive. ‘She doesn’t say she has a Sleep because she works harder and needs the extra hours awake, but I feel the judgement is implicit.’

  ‘I wonder if it’s unethical,’ she said to me once. ‘For me to be answering these letters when I don’t have a Sleep myself.’

  ‘No more than it is to offer a solution to any problem that isn’t yours,’ I replied, though she acted as though she hadn’t heard me.

  No matter how hard she tried, she could never stave off tiredness entirely. Our nights together often ended with her wilting on my sofa, jerking awake at 6 a.m. to insist that she had not been sleeping. I tended not to question this, any more than I did her nightly invasions. I found I liked her company more than that of my Sleep, and vaguely resented the longing looks I would catch her shooting the oblivious figure in the corner of the room. Sometimes when she left to get ready for work, she would kiss me on the cheek or the corner of my mouth, and I would go to get changed with clammy lines along the centres of my palms.

  The nights were strange-hued, liver-coloured. A late-September heat pressed downwards – clammy pad of fingers at the ankles – and I spent my small hours drifting around the flat in shorts and T-shirts, listening to Leonie reading letters by people desperate to have sex with their Sleeps, or with each other’s. When she was finished choosing which letters to reply to during the day, we would talk or read together. She used words in odd ways – the night nibbling on the windowsill, the pepper taste of her overchewed lip – and I talked to her about things that amused me. I told her that Evelyn Waugh’s first wife had also been named Evelyn and that the guy who voiced the Bugs Bunny cartoon had been allergic to carrots. She nodded along to what I said in a way that made me less inclined to bombard my Sleep with conversation in the hours she wasn’t there. I had an overbite, had badly needed braces as a teenager, and envied her sparse white mouthful, like little cowrie shells that always seemed a trifle slick. She told me that they were only so small because she had ground them down so much. One reason she was so desperate for a Sleep of her own was that permanent wakefulness would save her from chewing the teeth right out of her mouth. Her voice, I came to realise, was a little like the voice I affected when simulating my Sleep’s replies to my questions, and I liked it very much. Most nights, when she could no longer control the weary bobbing of her head and fell asleep on my shoulder, I would let her stay there and then still get away with her sheepish claim, when she awoke, that she had only been resting her eyes.

  My brother called to tell me he’d been cast in a play and I met him for drinks to celebrate. We drank red wine which stained our lips the same colour as the spaces beneath our eyes and he shouted his elation to the overcrowded bar. Public places were starting to smell of sleep, of unwashed linens. My brother upset his mostly empty glass in a re-enactment of his audition. His Sleep imitated the gesture, gesticulating none too kindly behind his back until he turned around and caught it.

  ‘And you’ve been no help at all,’ he told it, slurring gently, before turning back to continue his speech with an overdone archness. ‘Macbeth doth murder sleep. Eh?’

  Later, I came home to find Leonie waiting for me with an armload of letters and a plate of coconut biscuits. She said she had been itching to tell me a story about a girl she knew who worked for the same newspaper and had attended a series of seminars led by a woman who professed to know the secret to getting rid of a Sleep. Too much tea, the woman had warned was the cause of it, and an overreliance on artificial stimulus. Blue lights. Cut them out. Detox from dairy. The woman had sat in the centre of a circle of chairs, her Sleeplessness on full display as her students’ Sleeps wandered around the room. ‘Like a game of duck duck goose,’ the girl from the newspaper had said. At the end of the fourth seminar, it had transpired that the woman had locked her Sleep in a broom cupboard to support the illusion that she had rid herself of it with only water and vegan cheese. Several members of the group had heard it beating on the walls during a cigarette break and had broken the lock on the door trying to get it out. The girl had admitted to Leonie that she probably wouldn’t go back.

  ‘People shouldn’t be allowed them if they can’t treat them properly,’ Leonie said after she had finished telling the story, offering me a coconut biscuit. She looked unconvinced when I told her it was best not to think of them like dogs.

  I read an article by a woman mourning the loss of her unconsciousness. The article was anonymous, but the tang of femininity was obvious, the way hips can be. The writer talked about her sleep before it took a capital: the relief of absence, the particular texture of the tongue and weight of the head after a night of sleeping well. Sleeping gave me time off from myself – a delicious sort of respite. Without it I grow overfamiliar, sticky with self-contempt. The article was published in Leonie’s paper and I watched for her envy, the white of her knuckles as she clutched at the edges of the newspaper as she read. The writer described her Sleep as smelling like smoke and honey, recounted its movements aro
und her house: The waft, the restless up-and-down. It throws tennis balls at the walls the way they do in prison-break movies, kicks at the legs of my chairs. Leonie asked me what my Sleep smelled like and I told her: orange peel and photo paper. Odd, talismanic scents – my mother loading me down with tangerines for my journey to the city, sending me photographs of our old house in the post. A little later, having left the room to put on the kettle, I came back to find Leonie standing by my Sleep as it rooted through the boxes I kept under the bookcase to store old diaries and ticket stubs. Not noticing me, she moved in as close as she could, tilting her head towards my Sleep and breathing in. I watched this happen for several seconds, watched the way my Sleep quirked its head in irritation but failed to pull away. Still breathing in, she rested her forehead against its neck for a fraction of a second and I imagined the sensation, cold glass wet with condensation against her skin.

  The morning trains were overloaded with bodies both solid and spectral. I became used to standing whilst my Sleep muscled its way to a seat, grew accustomed to the rows of Sleeps with their legs crossed, the people clustered round the doors, grey-faced and leaning heavily. I spent lunchtimes wandering the city, watching people shuffle from coffee shops to bodegas – the greasy slink of cooked meat, egg sandwiches. I sat on steps and municipal benches, eating the orange cake my mother sent from home in tinfoil packages, talking to my brother on the phone. All around me people shimmered with exhaustion. One afternoon, I skipped lunch entirely to wander through one of the city cathedrals, listening for the hush of choir rehearsals, the muffle of choristers pushing their Sleeps’ muting hands from their mouths. I pictured my mother cupping her ear around the stillness of the country, evangelising tirelessly about haunted city sounds, the never-ending movement. The cathedral flickered. Thrum of bodies and almost-bodies.

  Leonie read me a letter, leaning up against my fridge one night with her reading glasses on. She had taken to wearing them more often in recent weeks, whether or not she happened to be reading. It prevented her eyes getting tired so quickly, she said, in a rare moment of admission that tiredness was something she felt. It was difficult for her, this unnatural wakefulness. During the day, she would look up from her writing desk and swear she saw the city moving past the window, as though either it or she were running very fast in one direction.

  ‘Our relationship is struggling,’ read the letter, ‘because of my husband’s Sleep. Sometimes his expression when I wake in the night scares me. He says some nights he leans over me and tries to will my Sleep out of me so that we can both be awake together. I sometimes feel I must be the only person in the city left asleep, though I still feel tired all the time, which in itself he considers a kind of betrayal.’

  Leonie came to sit beside me and laid her head down on my shoulder for a long time. It was hard, she said, to be sympathetic to all the people who wrote to her complaining of problems with their Sleeps, whilst at the same time feeling so bitterly conscious that there were still people like her left sleeping through the nights in this restless city. It made her worry that there was no countdown to zero, that some people might simply be destined to never have a Sleep at all. I told her that I didn’t know what she thought she was hoping for, that I considered my Sleep an unfriendly interloper at best. That sometimes I lay down on my bed and imagined unconsciousness, lay on one arm and then another until they lost all feeling and I could at least enjoy the sensation of sleep in some small part of my body. That the only thing I really liked about my new situation was her company – that and the occasional thought of the city holding me up despite how washed-out I felt, like hands beneath my arms and around my middle, keeping me off the floor. Of course, by the time I said all of this she was already asleep on my shoulder, snoring softly into my neck. Above us, the string quartet played a Dvorak nocturne, a slow movement in B.

  My mother called to check I was eating properly and to say she’d told me something like this would happen. She didn’t have a Sleep, of course. Very few people outside the city limits did. My mother’s voice on the phone was well rested, excessively virtuous. She told me she knew a man who lived not a stone’s throw away from her who had gone into the city one day on business and returned with a Sleep which didn’t belong to him. I asked her what had happened to the person whose Sleep had been stolen and my mother told me not to ask stupid questions. ‘What do I know about the horrible things? I should imagine they’re glad to be shot of it.’ She mentioned my brother, complaining that he never answered her calls. She asked me what I was doing with myself, whether I was seeing anyone, and I thought of telling her about Leonie, but my Sleep chose that moment to take the receiver away from me and hang up the call.

  I invited Leonie to my brother’s play and she accepted, resting her hand on my thigh for a moment and digging in her nails the way a cat might. She was sleepy in the down-curve of her mouth, her slack expression, and when she shifted towards me she smelled of hard city water. We were eating oranges on the sofa and she kept offering me pieces, though I had my own aproned out in my lap. The performance had been scheduled for two in the morning to capitalise on the listless night-time crowds. Leonie gamely brought along a flask of coffee and we sat in the dark together in the little raked space above a pub, sharing a box of chocolate-covered raisins and nudging each other every time my brother came on. On the stage, the actors’ Sleeps performed what looked like their own play in the spaces behind them. Without dialogue, their storyline was hard to follow but it kept drawing my eye – the translucent figures shifting about around the actors, miming along to words I couldn’t hear. It was nearly five by the time we got home and Leonie had finished her flask of coffee, eyes melting down her face. I asked her if she wanted to come in but she told me she needed her mouthguard, looking away in embarrassment and flashing her fingers by way of farewell. Less than an hour later, she knocked on my door again, complaining of nightmares. It was relentless, she told me, like everyone else’s unused dreams now came to bother her, bringing nightmares of fast-climbing vines and empty trains and disturbed places in the earth. I let her sleep on my sofa with her head pillowed in my lap until seven, when I had to start dressing for work. Moving between rooms with my toothbrush in one hand, I glimpsed her sitting up on the sofa, peeling another orange and offering slices to my Sleep.

  I went for dinner with my brother – though people now tended to eat whatever they wanted at different times of the day and night. He ordered eggs and milk, I ordered a cheeseburger, and we sat at a sugar-stuck table, still cluttered with the last patron’s coffee cups, a napkin smeared with orange lipstick, a plastic straw tangled up into a bow. Through the window overlooking the parking lot, the sky seemed of a strangely darker cast to the one I was used to, an unfamiliar absolute of night that I connected with being away from the city, from the swirling blues and changeabilities of light pollution. My brother showed me a newspaper review of his play. After reading it I flipped the paper over and read aloud from Leonie’s column, which contained advice for dealing with Sleeps who were rude to your grandmothers, who ate your food or ignored you or always seemed to want to fight. My brother listened to me idly, jostle-elbowed with his Sleep on the opposite side of the booth. He looked, I thought, strangely of a piece with the figure beside him. Reflected in the window, it was hard to tell which of them was paler, which would be more recognisable if I came up to the diner from the parking lot and saw them through the glass. I was still looking towards the window when my own Sleep, which had been wandering restlessly between tables, came to sit down beside me. I didn’t turn my head towards it, noticing the way it had started to smell like hard city water, like the rusted place around the plughole from which I occasionally had to wrench clogs of hair with a coat hanger bent at the neck.

  Leonie asked me to proofread something she was writing. I had a better eye for detail, she said, I was used to reading in the dark. The piece wasn’t for her advice column but one she had been asked to write for a magazine – a piece on living wi
thout a Sleep, she told me with a grimace. She’d write it anonymously, she said. It wasn’t something she wanted to own. Towards the end of the piece, she described it as like the sensation of looking for your shadow on the ground in front of you only to realise that it was midday.

  ‘It’s a good piece,’ I said, when I’d read it. ‘But you’re writing like you’re making it up. Like it’s fiction and you’re trying to imagine how someone like you must feel.’

  ‘Wishful thinking,’ she replied, as my Sleep entered the room from the kitchen, rattling its fingertips across the top of the radiator.

  She shrugged a shoulder and raised her head to look at me, leaning forward after a moment to kiss me on the side of my mouth, nodding her thanks. I dipped my chin, tilting slightly to catch her properly on the mouth and she kissed me gently for a moment before pulling away. She smiled at me vaguely, shrugged her other shoulder.

  My brother called to tell me to turn on channel four. He was watching a news piece on people who were doing drastic things to rid themselves of Sleeps. They interviewed a woman who had been arrested for luring her Sleep to the top of her apartment building and pushing it off. The way it fell, she said, you would have thought it didn’t know about gravity. The legs continuing to walk through nothing, the windmill before the sudden dragging drop. This woman was the only one who had agreed to be interviewed without insisting her face be pixelated. She had been released from police custody, there being no workable law in place to condemn her, but was largely housebound due to the protesters surrounding her property and forcing hate mail through the letterbox.