I Do Not Mind
Emma Kofman
I go to sensitive doctors. They draw blood from the crook of my arm and tell me they’ll know more in a few days. They have charts for these kinds of things. They tell me fatigue is very different from sleepiness which, in turn, is very different from sleeplessness. Without explaining the difference, they open a drawer to a mess of vials, organized by another logic I’m not privy to. They shuffle through glass-walled powders, oils, liquids, and something that I swear looks like the smallest teeth. In my left hand, I hold the first sample, and with my right, I pinch my ring and thumb finger together. I uncross my legs, sit up straight, and look forward. They will attempt to pry apart my right hand’s fingers, and I must resist. Strength is involuntary, a message. If you lose your footing, and—though you swear you were concentrating hard—your finger pads separate, it means your body needs more Vitamin K; secret this vial away in your bag.
My left hand grows nervous and sweaty around the successive ampules while my right fingers open, or refuse to, at random. I don’t know how they do it, this trick of force, making me think the substances are playing a game of telephone with my other hand. But they do not pull back the curtain. Instead, they take my debit card at the front desk, return it to me, poorer, and usher me out, overpriced bottles clinking around my purse. They don’t have me make an appointment to return; they say I’ll know when it’s time. The outer stairs are coral and wrapped in wrought iron. Fake limestone walls.
It’s hard to feel respected as the receptionist of a makeshift lobby with a desk that doesn’t cover my legs; even more so as I grow less vigilant in proportion to the bags under my eyes. The original building lobby is recovering from a fire, my predecessor’s fault. She fell asleep at her desk one winter and a guy walked in from the cold to smoke a cigarette, dropping it into a wastebasket on his way out. She only woke from the heat of the fire. Apparently, you can see it all on security footage, watch her scramble over her desk. Now, they keep my lobby uncomfortably cold, and No Smoking signs compete for wall space. I’m surprised they haven’t printed out stills from the incident and hung them up as well.
It’s been a year since I started and two since the fire, but everyone assures me the normal lobby is just lovely and wow are things progressing over there. Every couple of months, we get a photo from management of paint swatches or a new water feature, but I’ve never seen a construction worker or architect or arsonist at the site. I walk over to the coffee machine sitting on a gray foldout table and slot in another pod, green this time, and hopefully less bitter. Waiting at my desk for the caffeine to kick in, I give up on science.
No one is here yet. It’s early enough that the real workers are probably still sleeping. After long days of exercising their brains, they must fall asleep mid-descent to bed. I reach into my bag and retrieve a bottle from the pharmacy inside, drawing straws. I put an indiscriminate amount of powder into my coffee, scorch my tongue on the heat and chemicals, gag, then get down to business.
I use my extra screens to pull up a few definitive rankings for the best prescription tranquilizers, mattresses, and guided meditation apps. The mattress that ranks first on one list is left off another completely. I’d like to get Simply Living and Product Princess in a room together and really let them duke it out. The first employee walks in and salutes me. He’s wiry and boyish, wearing a hideous pair of orthopedic shoes. I return a small mouth movement and begin my daylong game of charades, shuffling around physical and digital files. I staple some papers together. Their gathered edges dull as they increase in rank. I slip my finger along the packet’s side, tempting it to cut me, but it doesn’t make a dent.
Three weeks with the supplements out of the vials, in my blood, and I still cannot sleep right. Tonight, I try five more melatonin and YouTube videos on potholes and how they are slowly formed. I dream of a small cut that never grows, remaining perfectly open, dusty, and pink. The small cut has no origin, just floats delicately around my skin, an extra mouth licking in air, making a canyon of space wherever it moves. When I wake up, all of me is a dry mouth.
Stepping onto the bus, I swear the driver hisses at me, tucked safely behind his wall of scratched plastic. I tap my card and feed the beast. There is normally only standing room, but today I’m rewarded for something, and the bus is mostly empty. I take a seat and get elbowed back to standing. I can still feel the warmth of the woman whose lap I’ve just sat on. Maybe I should sit back down, and she would mother me, but I hear her whisper into her phone, “This weird fucking chick just sat on me.” I look around for a new cradle, but people materialize in each seat I’d thought was empty. The bus is full so maybe I am being punished instead. I get off at the next stop and walk the rest of the way. At the doctors’, in the bathroom. The urine cup on the counter means I only get hands wrapped in purple gloves, nothing more. The most sophisticated scale in the world tells them my hair is made up mostly of corn and how much each of my cells weigh on their own, on average. They put me on a cushioned bench, and I surrender myself like Christ, except my arms are at my sides, so I’m not in the shape of a cross but in the form of a coffin. There are more doctors than before and they are all smaller than I remember, huddled before me. They commend me for coming back at the right time, look into my ears.
They have me stretch out my neck and flick it with a metallic tool that’s a mix between a reflex hammer and a prank sleeve of gum. A small piece of metal filled only with potential force. My mind is latex instead of linen, they try to explain. Permeability is requisite for sleep. I care somewhat about understanding this, though more so about the diagnostic criteria for sleeplessness-induced psychosis. And what can they give me for that? What I mind more than the lack of sleep is all the extra waking hours. Even if sleep comes, it is in fits of hallucinatory near-reality, and I’m practically awake, a dolphin that can’t be put under anesthesia because it needs to be conscious to breathe.
They lean their heads together and wink different phrases at each other. Waiting, I stare at framed posters for STD awareness and erectile dysfunction. In one, a semi-circle of toothful girls and boys try on chlamydia after failed acting and modeling careers. The doctors ask if I know what a cornucopia is; they tell me my brain is like a Thanksgiving feast. They prescribe new chalky powders. They recommend running. Or eating a large meal before bed. Or that I put a tablet on my tongue that forces a faster regeneration of thoughts, just like speeding up an escalator; by day’s end I’ll have run out and be as close to comatose or dead as possible. Or I should try only eating in the first twelve hours of the day. Or every other day. Maybe never again. They want to know if anything in my life has changed recently, and I almost claw at them. “If I knew of any psychological grounds, I’d be at a therapist,” I respond. Still, they cover all their bases and recommend me to a hypnotist. They say lack of sleep is the most dangerous drug and warn me off driving. They tell me that the CIA will blast metal music all night as a form of torture.
The doctors slot me into a taxi that smells like it’s made of deli meat. The driver wants to know why there’s one sock by the dashboard and no wife in his bed. I want to know the same. Instead, I tell him the heat is maybe on too high and could he stop here for a second while I buy some things. I buy cigarettes and give all but one of them to him. He says, “Thank you, but I do not smoke,” and tucks the pack into his shirt pocket. He doesn’t say anything else except to ask which building is mine and grunts, “Goodbye, friend” as I get out. I am tempted to beg for his email, or a forwarding address, a taxi stand he frequents. Instead, I take a blurry picture of his license plate as he pulls away.
I put on a red skirt and a short-sleeved sweater a couple shades darker. I look like a tube of lipstick or a confident woman’s fingernail. I almost feel it, too, as I walk into work—just arms and legs swaying; I put out these parts of me and let them roam unattended. On my desk there’s a note in a cursive I can’t read. The most I get is “once [ . . . ] then never again.” I fold it into a neat square and tuck it into my bra. I want these words to say just what I mean. I need a prophecy.
Orthopedic-shoes walks in, looks a second too long below my desk, and I realize my legs are splayed. I jerk them together and we proceed with our customary smiles of acknowledgment. But his teeth are sharper and wetter than they’ve been before, and his eyes catch on my breast as he passes by; so the note must be from him. The perverted and looped words sear my skin. I rush to the bathroom and burn the paper in the sink, watching it turn the color of light. New and old lobbies be damned.
Some feigned nausea at the end of the day should get me out the door before my suitor, but a sideways rain has other designs. Maybe I am to meet my maker in a boyish man with roaming eyes, and I’ll let him fuck me “once” and “then never again,” and afterward I’ll sleep forever like a fairytale in reverse. If you put “I think” before “I need,” you can disavow yourself of anything.
I search for a hiding spot, but the bathroom is being cleaned. Out of options, I push through draped plastic and take refuge in the construction site. A warm wind greets me, and the smell of fresh paint is pleasant in the same way as gasoline. The new-old lobby is dark, but I recognize a glimmer in the air as a large chandelier in the middle of the room. I stand underneath. Each crystal drop is stop-motion water, and the overall effect is a halo of glass edged with rainbows. I want to grab a crystal and have it melt in my hand while the doctors test my finger strength again. If my fingers come apart, inject the glass into my veins, cut the chandelier rope, and let me feel it land.
I lay down on my back and watch the glass melt. A sort of lazy feeling comes over you when you are unsure of the temperature or the time. If I was in a labyrinth and just kept walking, I wouldn’t make it out. At least I know what it feels like to be lost. Maybe wanting to stay that way a little longer isn’t a crime. Hours or minutes later I open my eyes and find myself on the floor, wrapped in unused wallpaper. Both the rain and the office have cleared by the time I leave.
I’m up late but have no remote, so I stand by the screen in case I want to change the channel. I can’t really see from here. Instead, it’s as though I’m a black hole, absorbing all the television glow before it reaches the room. I try to renegotiate my boundaries with an exercise the hypnotist suggested from her high horse of a chair: Picture yourself as a colander. Picture a great wind, then a flood. Toggle between the two until the picture becomes a feeling. If it never does (ten minutes or so), give up. The TV switches off on its own. I reach to turn it back on and something pops high in my back, my almost-shoulder. A great tension is released. Or pretends to be. I rediscover it in my skull an hour later. I need to sweat it out.
I sit in the bath. I fill pots with water and bring them to a rolling boil. I put a water-filled casserole dish in the oven and leave the door open. I turn the hot water on in the shower and let it run. The steam grabs hold of me, each droplet on my skin a new pore. Is this the hypnotist’s colander? I put my cat on the balcony when she becomes damp and tries to lick herself dry. I watch a yellow shellacked bug try to crawl up my sweat-slicked calf. It doesn’t make it past my anklebone. I trick it onto my fingertip and ferry it over to the cat. She bats it right off the balcony’s edge, and I feel sorry for it, hoping it remembered it could fly on its way down. Back inside, every object excises its history—the dining chairs smell like sauce and ass, the windows drip tears, the countertop manifests oily fingerprints. Maybe I can go back and find the root.
Three days later, I take enough weed or ketamine to kill a small horse. Then suddenly, I am dreaming about all the facts we learn when someone else thinks we’re ready: the fate of the dairy cow, an erection described in a YA novel, a wheatpaste banner that someone has tried to copyedit in yellow spray paint, that day in elementary school where we learn that all glass is always melting. They drop this fact in the center of our second grade classroom and never pick it back up. We grow butterflies from scratch in a white canopy that hangs like a shroud from the ceiling, then take a field trip to release the adults in the museum’s vivarium. It is a humid room of glass, and all the panes are slowly sinking; soon I’ll be bared and naked. It will be life-affirming, the way my cheeks will burn again like a babe’s.
I wake curled like a dog on the kitchen mat. I’ve missed so much of the workday that it’s better not to try. The apartment’s light is already past its prime. My mind might be latex, but my body is linen, and I need to leave before I also start to fill with shadows. I only make it to the corner and into the waiting coffee shop.
It is the barista’s responsibility to refuse the third drink or at least explain that three mochas total eight espressos. She says nothing at all. I drink my third mocha and sit by the window, sunning myself, opening into the light like climbing vines, hoping to reset a fundamental connection. The sunlight reflects off the building across the street and hits me in the eyes. It will blind me for only as long as it takes the earth to rotate and reconfigure this arrangement of sun, glass, me.
The doctors gave me a journal that is also coral and covered in ivy. The pages are unlined, and at arbitrary intervals, there are sets of handwritten questions in blue ink. “When did your father last hug you? When was the last time you were picked up? Floated off the face of the world. Can you remember the bird that hit your parents’ windshield on their way to your birth? Think now, it was a sparrow, wasn’t it?” I try to decode the chocolatey dregs in my cup, hoping for a suggestion. But I have no history, nothing to string into a narrative, no mechanism for making sense of this unsympathetic wakefulness. I leave the café through a jingling door, and it’s as if a bell dangles from a blue ribbon around my neck. I’m a creature crawling home with one less layer of myself than I started with. “On page, out of mind,” the bald doctor had whispered as he slipped me the journal. The air outside is hot, and the last of the sunlight renders my dress sheer and the top of my hair warm.
It’s gotten so I can’t differentiate what I’m reading from what I’m hearing. The chlamydia poster screams at me in surround sound—“Protect yourself, or else!” I don’t even know what the doctors are asking me to repeat. Parroting my old self, I say something like, “I am ill and never ill and, in my sickness, maybe I have found health.” They don’t understand the subtlety, give me a sedative shot to put me down for a couple of hours; don’t worry, they’ll give me the room. I notice for the first time the seaweed wallpaper, feel myself sinking underwater, the seaweed growing over the edges of the posters, the sedative like concrete in my veins. I see what I want all around. When I wake up, I ask for more of what they gave me. But there are no doctors, and I’m home with an empty bag of powder stuck to my cheek.
* * *
They call my name less than ceremoniously and tell me to get on the waxed sheet. An obsequious medical student cranes his neck from the outskirts. I am grateful for the company, or at least the witness. I ask patiently, “Could the new dreams be a side effect of something you’ve given me? Are your drugs reacting to something in my environment? They’re happening during the day now too, I think.” They couldn’t possibly tell me.
I show them my cheek, but they can’t see any cut, especially not one that opens and closes like I am describing. I am losing my audience. They write me a new prescription with a warning that it could cause facial twitching. When I hand the slip to the pharmacist, she almost doesn’t want to fill it, and I don’t know whether I am scared or relieved, but at least we’re getting somewhere.
I dose myself in the parking lot and take the bus to the office even though it is late. I set up camp under the chandelier and wait for the twitching to begin, a clenching involuntary and totally desired; necessary. The room or medicine works its magic, and I experience what can only be described as a lack of events. I go back the following night, but there is a man and his dog sleeping on a piece of cardboard in the entrance.
It’s amazing to get up in the morning after being awake the whole night and think no, no more noise today, please. It’s just sleep, I tell myself, it is nothing like a gun. I shower, take stock of my phone, and find a backlog of silenced meditation reminders, news alerts for volcanic activity in Hawaii, and an email from my boss. He is thrilled to let us know the lobby is complete and hopes we see it as a refresh rather than a restoration. Something like a phoenix.
The fridge is empty, and I try to go to the market but end up at the doctors’ instead, hurrying past the same iron and coral and limestone. It turns out I was rushing to wait. The waiting room is filled with more important ailments and impatience. There’s a spread of magazines, a repurposed fishbowl with samples of gummy vitamins. A brochure recommends sterilizing metal coils I can hold in my palm and later implant in my body. The gummies are stale and glue me shut. I’d pull out a molar if I tried to open my mouth, so I suck lazily instead, saliva rushing forth, throat pushing it back down, and again.
The nurse calls me in with an approximation of my name. The doctors have me go on the scale naked this time. It plays classical music as it performs some calculations, and they ask me to name the tune, tick a box when I can’t, and refuse to let me look at their cheat sheets. They draw more blood than necessary and tell me it’s to help my body start working on itself more. I ask them to stick some leeches on while they’re at it, since medicine is looping back on itself. A response comes from a loudspeaker in the room, or from my mouth, or one of theirs, or the ultrasound wand pressing against my breast and through to my heart. They don’t know who’s talking and neither do I. Information is lost and gone for good. There are imposters now, mixed in with the certified professionals, telling me abbreviations and half-truths. My speaking is no longer constructed for communication, just stretches out in hopes of touching something solid. It’s a relief when they ignore me and focus on reading a number for my blood pressure, which will not settle.
On the way home from the fake doctors with their never-ending wrong answers, I need to do something violent. Run as hard as I can. Or shower in scalding water and put a vegetable peeler to my skin, make craters in my scalp. I need to ruin and perfect this body. Wring it out with one great squeeze: Here I am, all of me. Tip me over—not a drop left.
Instead, I get off the bus early and walk to the mattress store that shares a wall with a lighting outlet. I’ve been in neither, but at night they’re lit up attractively, firecracker-red lettering above floor-to-ceiling windows. Fluorescent lighting that levels everything. I’ve always been tempted to stop in on my evening commute, but tonight it’s different—a compulsion. The storefront gems are irresistible, extending infinitely far like mirrors reflecting each other.
Once inside, everything is embroidered, all the lines and colors raised a hair above the surface. A blond woman with tight, curly hair—a tigress, really—knows I mean business. No one finds themselves in a mattress store by accident. She flies up from the back calling me “Hon,” telling me her name is Alicia. Alicia holds me firm in her gaze as I try to tell her what I’m looking for in a bed. Her questions are quick-fire and precise. Partners? Top sheet? Night sweats? Pets? Injuries? Favorite positions—sleeping or otherwise? It is like being at the eye doctor and having to guess which of the two equally clear sets of letters is blurry. I must get the answers wrong, because with each new mattress she has me lie on, her face screws up, torsion building in her cheeks. She says my problem is something like trying to perform division on words—a base conflict.
I can’t collect myself here, so instead I offer up the same sort of confusion I’m feeling. For Alicia to do with what she can. I tell her, “Once, I couldn’t fall asleep because I thought I might find my Swiss army knife in my bag and slit my wrists. I had to get up and put it in the refrigerator.” Alicia just looks at me, worries a curl off of her forehead. I take this as a cue to continue, “I don’t know, I guess I hoped sleeping me wouldn’t remember hiding it. Maybe I’d wanted her to be someone else, living in an alternate world of facts.” My voice drops away and there is silence and an uncomfortable stillness. Then she takes my hand.
At home, too tired to set up my new bed, I sleep on the old and dream of scabs. They lose their purchase and slide around, jostling up against my edges. Then, I get back from the store and open the fridge to place the fresh milk I bought in the bottom right corner. Then, I get back from the store and open the fridge to discover that there was no need for me to buy milk, for there’s already a carton in the bottom right corner. I get back from the store and open the fridge and see the first milk in the bottom right corner, smell the rotting second carton of milk on the counter behind me. In my hand I hold a third carton, dewy and cold. I wake up and a glass of water’s been knocked to the floor. The cat laps at the puddle.
The following night and I still don’t own a hose, so the waterbed lies blue and empty on the floor. I lie back on my plain bed and feel I am lying instead atop fertile earth. Through the night I watch the mattress-ground below me crack and shrink downward and myself swell with stolen water. I need to pee. The bathroom is tiled and cold, and if I wasn’t awake before, I am now. I step on the scale before I pee, then again after, and learn that I have returned a pound of borrowed water to the flowing world. The hard, slip-resistant plastic of the scale is a welcome reprieve for my feet—its neutral temperature making it feel like a natural extension of myself. The floor is lava, the scale my pedestal, and the three of us a fast-sinking trophy. I crawl back into the nest I have left in the bed.
Tonight, I return with a hose that attaches to the kitchen sink. I fill the bed, and even though it still smells like plastic, cover it with sheets and lie down. It depresses beneath my body; synthetic skin creeping ever so slightly up and around mine. This must mean I have not filled it enough, but I am too comfortable to move. The saleswoman was right, and I am grateful for her suggestion, because I fall right asleep and dream only of sex, as she said I would, and this, I do not mind.