Sleep Is a Runaway Train and I’m Tied to the Tracks

“My Sleep” by Sara Jaffe

“Are you asleep?” Carmen said.

I had been standing up strumming with my guitar around my neck, and then I had sat down on my amp. My pick was still pinched between my fingers. The last thing I remembered was playing the scratchy part of the riff, right before Carmen went into her “Whoa-oa-oa”s.

“What the fuck?” Carmen said. “Do you know how little I sleep?” She pointed to her eyes, under which I guessed I was supposed to see bags.

LJ watched us from behind the drums. “Maybe you’re getting sick?” they said.

“I feel fine,” I said. I didn’t get sick. I hadn’t had a cold in years.

LJ said, “Do you want some of my Adderall, though?”

“Sure,” I said. I didn’t know if it would help, but my sleep was hungry and unaccountable. LJ ran up to their room and Carmen turned toward the wall, pretending her bass needed tuning. “It’s not something to be mad about,” I said. I put my fingers on the strings and tried to place them where they’d been when my body blinked out. I let one chord careen into another.

“I think it had more of a spastic Bo Diddley kind of sound,” LJ said, ambling back down the stairs. She handed me two blue pills.

“I’ll take them next time,” I said. “I’m awake now.”

After practice I called my ex for advice. We hadn’t officially broken up, but I’d starting calling her my ex to prepare for the eventual detachment. She suggested I look into a sleep study. “I don’t think that will help me,” I said. I slept fine at night. I didn’t snore dangerously, or have insomnia like Carmen, who in the middle of the night would power-clean our kitchen until she wore herself out. Insomniacs had those taut, rangy hours, their own relationship with the dark.

“Then a therapist?” my ex said.

“I’m not depressed,” I said.

“Depression can manifest in a lot of different ways,” she said. “It’s not just feeling sad.” My ex was eight years older than me and ran a tenants’ rights nonprofit, and when I lived in the city over the summer I’d always let her pay for my drinks and dinner.

“I feel 100% normal the rest of the time,” I said. We talked for a minute about her upcoming visit. I looked at the clock—still a half hour until the dining hall opened. “I have to go to dinner,” I said.

That night I woke up at 4am and felt awake. I considered cleaning the kitchen. I felt a little figure knocking around inside my skull, playing it like a drum. I got up and went over to my desk. I dumped the paper clips out of an old Altoids container and found the blue pills in my jeans pocket. I put the container with the pills in my backpack, so I’d have them when I needed them.

In the morning I drank tea in my kitchen and coffee at the café, where I sat outside with LJ and our friends who smoked. I stayed awake in Poetry and Ideology of Early Modern England and fell asleep in Queering the City, which was my favorite class. I usually had something to say. We’d been talking about Giovanni’s Room and I’d been working up to a comment about how David needed to be out of the city, at the cottage in the countryside, to tell his story, as if Paris for him was both possibility and paralysis, and as I was thinking I was noticing how awake I felt and what a relief it was, which was something I often noticed just before the curtain of sleep drew over me. By the time I woke up, moments or minutes later, my insights were irrelevant and on the board was a word I didn’t know.

My ex had left me a voicemail during class. “I’ve been thinking about your sleep thing,” she said. “I wonder if it might have to do with how hard you push yourself, like that thing you told me about your Bat Mitzvah?” I let the message end and threw my phone in my bag, then dug it out and played it again. I’d forgotten that I’d told her about the time I’d had to ask my parents to make me practice for my Bat Mitzvah for an hour a day, because that’s what all my friends’ parents made them do. The story was supposed to illustrate my parents’ inattentiveness. At the end of the message my ex suggested I try taking naps. Who had time to deliberately put themselves to bed in the middle of the day? I didn’t have any classes for the rest of the afternoon, so I went to the library. I chose the room with the least comfortable chairs, and every time I felt myself falling asleep I stood up and got a drink of water from the fountain in the hall, until I didn’t feel like drinking any more water. I tried listening to music on my headphones, a song by Le Suisse that I thought might give me some ideas for the song we’d been trying to finish. There was something in the way the guitar buzzed around the bass line, threatening to land. I had LJ’s Adderalls in my bag but what I had to get done—commenting on a story for my fiction workshop about a guy on a long hike—wasn’t important enough to waste them on.

My workshop met the next afternoon in the lounge of an old wooden cottage that housed the English Department overflow. We sat on couches and armchairs and there was one guy who always sat on the floor and took his shoes off. I was the only sophomore. There was a crew of seniors who looked like writers, two tousled blond guys who I never saw anywhere else and a tall mean girl, Dani, who was nice to me at parties. They went out to the bar with our professor after class. The story about the hike was by one of the blond guys, and I might have gotten more out of if I’d cared more about philosophy, or the Bible. It sounded like a 36-year-old had written it. I had loved the story we’d read the week before by Dani, particularly a scene on a subway where the narrator tells the person he’s talking to on a cell phone that he has to get off because the train is about to go back underground. Then you find out they’re only halfway across the bridge.

I woke up to movement from my left as my couchmate went into his backpack for a pen. Dani was arguing that the girlfriend in the story could be more three-dimensional and the shoeless guy was saying it didn’t matter because all the characters were archetypes. Our professor let them fly. After class I took my time packing up. I liked our cozy lounge, the tiny bathroom in the back, how I’d never heard of any other class that met there. Outside, the people who smoked stood smoking and talking about whether they were going to walk or drive to the bar. My professor, smoking, called me over. “Not such a fan of Austin’s story?” he said.

“No, I liked it,” I said.

“I mean, I get it,” he said. “I used to doze off in lecture classes all the time. Just a little more awkward in our intimate setting?”

“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling something thicker than embarrassment. “I’ve been having trouble sleeping.”

“Insomnia,” my professor said. “Curse of the trade. Are you left-handed, too?”

“No,” I said. It was probably the third time we’d spoken to each other directly, and this was my second class with him.

My professor dialed up a sympathetic smile. “Don’t sweat it,” he said, stamping out his cigarette on the concrete steps. “Coming to the bar with us?”

“I’m not 21,” I said. My ex had given me an old ID of hers, but it was expired and not one of our features was alike.

At the health center I took a number. When the intake person asked the reason for my visit, I said, “I’m falling asleep all the time. At inconvenient times.”

“So, excessive fatigue?” she said. I let her write that down.

Everyone else in the waiting room was wearing sweatpants and looked sick, thumbing their phone screens dull-eyed. The desk person called my name and sent me to the room of the nurse practitioner on duty. She had soft curly hair that reminded me of pictures of my mom in the ’80s. I explained my sleep and she nodded empathically. “Is there any chance you’re pregnant?” she said.

“What?” I whispered, instantly rageful. I tried to remember if it felt more empowering to say I only have sex with women or I don’t have sex with men.

I tried to remember if it felt more empowering to say I only have sex with women or I don’t have sex with men.

“I’m required to ask,” she said, semi-apologetically. She continued to lob off the obvious questions—how many hours of sleep did I get a night? was I drinking excessively?—and suggest possible diagnoses: anemia, thyroid.

“What about narcolepsy?” I said.

“You know,” she said, “depression’s not just feeling sad.” She left me with a referral for Mental Health and a lab order to get blood drawn. I sat with my arm out in the blood-taking chair and felt my sleep pawing around in me, unsatisfied.

At home LJ sat at the kitchen table drinking soy milk from a shot glass. They finished the shot and poured another. “Do you want me to get you a bigger glass?” I said.

LJ had done something to their knee and had to quit rugby one game into the season. “I want to feel powerful,” they said. I’d never asked why they had the Adderall, if they also had other pills.

“Should we have a party?” I said.

I went to my room and got the handle of Bacardi my ex had given me as a back-to-school present. LJ went out to get mixers and I texted Carmen, who said she’d invite people. Davey showed up at 8 with a plastic punch bowl. We poured in the rum and lemonade and Sprite, and decided the drink should be called the Lucky Michelle, for the girl LJ had their eye on. “I need it!” LJ said, meaning the drink or the luck, slamming a cupful, always more modest than anyone.

I drank one cup and ladled another. Everyone was in the living room getting ready to play Celebrity, but this wasn’t the kind of party I’d meant. “Don’t you think we should go find Michelle?” I said to LJ. I wanted a dark room packed with people. I wanted to talk to strangers in word balloons and have them stick wherever.

“I know where she is,” said Davey’s roommate.

Before we left I grabbed Carmen by the wrist and made her watch me throw my phone into the laundry pile. “I can’t find my phone!” I said.

“Call your laundry!” she said.

On the cold sidewalk we were a warm cheery clump, so alive. LJ crouched to let Little Doug pounce up on her back and took off monkey-screaming down the block. Carmen and Davey sang songs from RENT. “My ex knows the writer whose story they stole to make that musical,” I said, and Carmen said, “Does she know you call her your ex? Isn’t she coming next weekend?” and I said, “It’s a really fucked-up story, this writer never saw a cent from it.”

The party was at an off-campus duplex. I let my friends push through to the backyard without me and I stood in the living room surrounded by bodies. I had ended up with the water bottle of leftover Lucky Michelle and I wet my lips with it. Leaning against the staircase was Dani from workshop, who yelled my name and reached her hands out when she saw me. “I knew you’d be here!” she said, grabbing my wrists to extract me from the crowd. “She always knows where to be!” she said to her friend, who didn’t care. “I wanted to tell you,” Dani said, “I loved that you talked about that scene on the subway in my story.”

“It was my favorite,” I said.

“Mine too!” said Dani. “Did you know fucking Austin told me I should cut it?”

“Because it’s not about God!” I had to be yelling in her ear for her to hear me, I was close to her, she laughed harder than I’d thought she would and her shoulder settled, touching mine.

“Why don’t you ever come with us to the bar?” she said. I said I didn’t have an ID. “We need to get you one!” she said. She was wearing a leotard or a shirt that looked like a leotard.

“Maybe you noticed,” I said, “I have this problem with sleeping.”

Dani gave me a quick look. She said something to her friend and pushed me around the corner into the bathroom. It was surprising that at such a crowded party the bathroom was unoccupied, and I took it as a sign—that I should take the key she passed me, that I should sniff up the powder like someone who knew how. I watched what Dani did and tilted my head back, tasting the chemical drip. Sleep was a coward’s drug. “Is this what you wanted?” Dani said, pressing her body back against the towel rack, and her tone with me had changed, I had to prove I deserved her attention.

I felt for my phone in my pocket and remembered I’d set myself free for the night. I took a step toward Dani. “Thank you so much,” I said. “That really helped.” My whole body whistled and I hated guilt. If she offered another keyful I’d say no.

In the morning there was a hole in my memory. It didn’t start right after I’d left the bathroom—I remembered going into the living room and seeing LJ and Michelle making out in an armchair, going into the backyard and seeing Carmen being intense with someone by the keg, I remembered remembering I’d left my water bottle in the bathroom and finding it on a stool by the stairs. When I found it it was empty. I lay in bed and waited for the rest of the night to roil back. I remembered getting home and digging for my phone in my laundry pile and finding it dead, flattening out in bed with one foot on the floor to stop the spins.

I sat up. I felt fine. I found my roommates in the kitchen looking terrible. Michelle sat on LJ’s lap. Carmen was saying something about the pizza she’d eaten at the party on Fountain Ave. “You went to Fountain?” I said.

“We all did,” she said. “It was your idea?”

“Right,” I said.

“Did you black out?” said Michelle, who I didn’t really know. I reached into the hole as far as I could and came up with nothing. I should have been scared but the idea of oblivion awed me. Who had I been there?

Carmen said, “What was going on with you and that Dani girl? You were talking about how you didn’t know if she was a dancer?”

The cocaine, I was pretty sure, hadn’t caused the hole—I’d been arrow-sharp but it hadn’t lasted and I’d found more to drink. “No, nothing,” I said. “We were talking about writing.” I knew how it would sound. For a flash I remembered Dani leaning back on the towel rack and I wondered if I’d found her again and gone back into the bathroom, if she’d given me more drugs, if I’d remember if she had. “I think she might have wanted to make out with me,” I said, to hear how it sounded out loud. Carmen started lecturing me on straight girls and Michelle looked embarrassed. LJ, over-loudly, suggested we get out of the house and find breakfast.

I drank coffee and ate eggs and then did so much work at the library. I took a break and went out on the steps to call my ex. “Are we okay?” she said.

I told her I’d forgotten my phone at home. “We had a cocktail party,” I said. “We made up this cocktail, the Lucky Michelle? Then I guess I drank so much I blacked out.” I said it to feel the satiny cloak. Like my sleep, all it wanted was to pull me in deeper. My ex was freaking out. “I’m fine,” I said. “I’m not even hungover.”

She thought I was in deep avoidance mode. “Can I find you a therapist?” she said. “I’m sure I know people in the city who know people up there.”

I told her I was talking to Mental Health. “I’m not anti-therapy,” I said, which was true. I spent the afternoon finishing the story I had due for workshop. I was writing about the train tracks near my house growing up, which my protagonist had to cross to get to and from school. At the beginning of the year she had taken the long way around, but she had eventually decided it wasn’t worth the extra time. She joined a group of her friends who walked home over the tracks every day. They walked down the muddy embankment and under the overpass where pigeons nested and shat and cooed warily. Someone had spraypainted REVENANT in red on the overpass wall, but it didn’t really have a Satanic effect. When they got to the tracks a freight train was stopped there. My protagonist’s friends walked right up to the train and hoisted themselves up and over the platform between cars, but she wasn’t that coordinated. The train was heavy and silent and still, its bottom lip a few feet off the ground, so she tossed her backpack through and went under. I printed the story and got copies to everyone’s mailboxes, thinking for a second about writing something extra on Dani’s. I didn’t want more drugs from her. But if I did—what would I write? I’m still sleeping or I’m not sleeping anymore.

At practice I kept trying to get my friends to give me information about what I’d been like during the part of the night I’d lost, but all Carmen remembered was that I’d been “bossier than usual,” and LJ remembered that I’d been singing on the way to the second party. “It sounded amazing,” she said, “there was something in your voice.” I tried to get her to bring back some words or a tune—was it “Archangels Thunderbird”? “Bury the Hair”? Did it sound like something I was coming up with on the spot?—but all she could say was “You sounded so free.” We were still trying to get through the song we were stuck on. LJ banged, Carmen noodled, and I buzzed without landing. We couldn’t talk about what we wanted the song to sound like, that wasn’t what we did. One by one we stopped and glowered. My amp hummed, blotting our air.

At practice I kept trying to get my friends to give me information about what I’d been like during the part of the night I’d lost.

“Are we okay?” I said.

On Monday morning I felt as alert as I had been all weekend, which I attributed more to the hole than the drugs. Some knot in me had worked itself out. It made sense that it had had to happen when I wasn’t, or couldn’t be, paying attention. I had a voicemail from the health center after Early Modern England saying my results were normal. My iron was a little low. I wasn’t displaying the symptoms of narcolepsy. At lunch I filled a bowl with spinach from the salad bar, and in Queering the City I sat in the third row and was alert at my desk. I listened, I answered, I took notes. I thought, “I’m so awake!” The rush of relief, and that was the end of me—the flurry of fast blinking and then the sinking sensation / when someone drowns, who was that, Schuyler, who we’d read a few weeks before.

The professor asked to speak to me after class. She made me walk with her to her office down the hall. “Sit,” she said. She said, “Is anything alright? I mean, everything?” She didn’t wear compassion naturally.

I tried to get in front of it. “It’s happening to me everywhere,” I said. “At band practice the other day. . .” She asked if I’d been to the health center. “Last week,” I said. “I’m waiting on the results.”

“Unfortunately,” she said, “one’s actions can still be read as disrespectful.”

“Oh no,” I said. “I can’t help it.” I wanted her to find the Adderall in my bag, blame my sleep on drugs. Weren’t Schuyler and those other poets crazy for pills? I said, “Is it disrespectful to you or the other students?”

She didn’t like the question. “The other students are doing what they can to be present and attentive,” she said.

“Oh right,” I said. “Good information. I mean, I’m sorry. My coffee this morning must have been decaf.” The thing about the Schuyler line was the irony, which only floated if the medium was right.

I walked home past Fountain Ave and tried to feel some animal pull. My hole wasn’t a cloak but a void, flat black and unreadable. At least my sleep let me feel the release of succumbing to it. At home LJ was having a long goodbye on the porch with Michelle, and Carmen was napping. I went up to my room and called my ex. I got really comfortable on my bed. “About next weekend,” I said. She sighed in a way that sounded melodramatic but I knew was real. I’d heard it on the humid, impervious nights I’d spent in her apartment over the summer, drinking cold wine on the fire escape and watching movies that came out before I was born, when she realized in a few hours she’d have to get up and take care of the world.

“You’re doing a really bad job,” she said. I didn’t say anything. I was thinking about how at our last dinner before I went back to school I thought about paying and didn’t. “So there you go,” she said. “I know you’ve always wanted to hear that.” She was right. I felt innocent. Not of what she’d accused me, but of everything else. My brain eased and quieted. It was dough in a bowl. “Oh my god are you asleep?” my ex said. After she hung up on me I closed my eyes and slept until it was dark.

When I woke up the house felt empty. “I’m home!” I yelled.

Carmen came down the hall and pushed my door open. “Are you sick?” she said. “What are you doing?”

“I don’t get sick,” I said. I should have invited her to sit down and told her that I’d ended things with my ex, or brought things closer to ending, she’d be glad to hear it, but I didn’t yet know how the story should go. I sat up and turned on my bedside light. “You don’t have a fake ID, do you?”

“Hold on,” she said. She came back with an ID of a 23-year-old named Casey, who looked remarkably like both of us. “I used it to get into shows in Boston last summer,” Carmen said. It was such an un-Carmen thing to have done.

“My fiction professor invited me to come to the bar after class,” I said. “Is it cool if I borrow it?” I turned on the light and we looked at Casey’s face. She really could have been our brother or sister, our grown-up child.

Before my next workshop I put the ID in my wallet and hid mine behind my leftover Metrocards. I went to the café and drank 16 ounces of coffee—iced so I could get it quickly through a straw—and reread my story, which I thought was pretty good, though I felt self-conscious about having used the word “shat” for the pigeons; it didn’t sound like me. Dani was outside the English building smoking with Austin. “What’s up,” she said. “You don’t smoke, right?”

“Not really,” I said. I stood there with my ice-filled cup.

“Rachel and I hung out at Caleb and those guys’ party last week,” Dani said.

“Cool,” said Austin. I wanted him to ask a question about me so I could hear what Dani would say. I tried to look at Dani without looking at her.

“Austin just got into divinity school,” she said. She could have been joking, but he was her friend.

“Wow, congratulations,” I said, and then it was time to go in. As in all workshops I sat and listened and took notes, and most things people said were what I expected, how the logistics of the walk from the school to the tracks were confusing (true), how the protagonist’s friends didn’t raise enough of a protest when she started to crawl under the train (intentional), how they wanted to know what was up with her parents, who weren’t in the story at all. When the guy without shoes brought up the parent thing I felt embarrassed for writing a story about someone so young.

It was our professor’s habit to keep quiet until the whole class had spoken. Then he would pronounce. At the end of our discussion, he agreed about the logistics and the friends, said the parent part didn’t seem relevant. Then he sat back and said, “And I was thinking, when she decides to go underneath,” and he hadn’t even finished his sentence when Dani started nodding, and I could feel the 16 ounces sugaring my veins, and Austin and everyone were nodding, and I nodded too, though I couldn’t see it coming—“wouldn’t it have been something if the train started moving?”