Blake Butler - Nothing - A Portrait of Insomnia

Many people presume, often as a kind of torture logic, that in the night while they can’t sleep, everyone else in the world is peaceful, calm, and at rest as if underwater, except for on the other side of the globe, where there is light, and those bodies we might run into in gas stations or late-night stores. Seeing bodies out of the house at night, among the streetlights or in the glow of moon or lamps of cars, can seem like checkpoints passed in video games, characters waiting to be invoked. Bodies at cash registers who check us out might seem like machines, always there, and for them to be elsewhere would surprise us, in the way a child is startled when seeing a teacher outside of school. Though, of course, each of these persons is his own person, and has had the same shaped thoughts as you regarding you. “Each person is an experience for others,” Lyn Hejinian wrote. “But many creatures have memory, maybe all do, otherwise nothing would happen. .. And if there is an afterlife it is going to be damned crowded. .. I probably wouldn’t even be able to find my own father.”138 As, ultimately, no matter how near or comforted or spatially rewarding a person might be in their body at your body, there is a point at which the bridging must desist — the point at which here is where our space remains separate, no matter how close or clean or needed — each self surrounded only by that which holds them in their own.

At the center of my young self, opened with whirring, the state of my sleep stretched most nights so tight it formed a darker, ageless twin; any night could last forever and no time, an approximation of Zeno’s paradoxes, such that “if everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest, and if that which is in locomotion is always in a now, the flying arrow is therefore motionless.” In the house each night we grow older, each hour shorter in relative duration than the previous had been, an increasingly diminished fraction of our prior compiled years, though often seeming long and longer as they pass, for at an inverse rate of change of being their oncoming feels less new. Sleep is meant to punctuate this action, providing meter. A beginning and ending point to each subset method, named a day. Each body operating its own house within the house: limbs and skin around some center in a meaty, blood-stuffed dark — our self as a location, scrolled inside skin among the nights: as all time is night or night in relief, our body a hidden city aboveground.

I learned as well to fight the fright the silent dark held by binge-eating breakfast cereal before bed. Crispix or Corn Flakes worked most often, though it was sometimes Shredded Mini-Wheats or Fruity Pebbles or Raisin Bran, depending on what there was enough of in the pantry and how many bowls it took. I could wolf through enough of a box to polish off a handle of 2-percent in half an hour, hunched at the kitchen table in yellow light, the backyard and pool through the glass doors behind me mostly masked with the reflection of the room and me there in it. The crunch of cold milk with increasingly soggy flakes, often topped off with a layer of honey, filled through my gut and stomach to my neck — as up to a perhaps embarrassing age of awareness I saw the body as an empty, unorganed vessel filled by whatever came into it from the outside, the phrase “I’ve had it up to here,” issued from my mother in passing fury, serving a reminder of our hollow insides or perhaps a warning about how eventually, if stuffed over, we could burst. The caloric blanket of heavy eating in the evening somehow would calm me down as I seemed inside me to fill to closer fit the house, fattening clean out of whatever malfunction or displeasure had reared up throughout the day. The cereal, once chewed and digested, formed a slick runny mush coat down my insides, which would therein make me thicker, warmer, flooded free to drift off to whatever shape inside my skull a sleep would mend — not a muscle, but a growing curtain, making more flesh upon the flesh. The sound of rummage the stomach makes as it is being pressed hard against the walls inside the body performs a kind of music, the friction of your increasing sheets of skin, the food filling up the space where otherwise would have fed the silence of the terror.

This waking routine, faithfully repeated, made my young body grow large. Eating my way into exhaustion each night, if responsible for snuggling my way into a healthy resting-cycle routine, also rolled me into an unhealthy rind of chub. Looking at the oval-shaped picture frame of my school shots from kindergarten up through high school is like looking at a time-lapse capture of a strange human balloon, one mostly always with a horrid bowl cut, cheeks with true define. In all the pictures, even the young ones, I have bags under my eyes, except in those where I am fattest. In all, I go along with the commanded smile. During the period from fourth grade, in which I looked mostly like any normal child, to tenth grade, the apex of my gaining, I went from weighing what I was supposed to for my framing, to many times the normal weight — filling out the selves stuffed fat inside me, swelling, gathering in mass upon the air. In ninth grade I weighed 260 pounds. There were several of me on me. I could hold my stomach with both hands — using my flesh flaps to speak in other voices, to roll around me as I moved. Certain days in certain shorts walking too long would make my skin chafe into rash in bright red patches, my self rubbing against my self as I waddled down the halls. Eating whole pizzas in one sitting. Ordering two twenty-packs of Chicken McNuggets and a large fry and Coke at the drive-thru. In food, comfort, I got larger. And I got larger, containing whatever I contained: sweat not sweated; cells not destroyed, but awakened; white fat foam. If nothing else, for now I was well rested, if thicker, wetter, growing grown.

What’s off about my young concept of the food-induced sleep coma, I’ve discovered since, is that as the body thickens, with increasing BMI, the actual quality of sleep declines, trailing off in slow-wave rest and overall sleep duration, in which the truest rest rides, and growing more shallow, shorter, weak—“THE PREVALENCE OF OBESITY IN THE US HAS DOUBLED OVER THE PAST 3 DECADES. DURING THIS SAME TIME PERIOD, SELF-REPORTED SLEEP DURATION has decreased.”139 Though it may have been easier to nod off in those caloric blankets, bloating, these teasing periods of patterns in which I’d help myself zone out from underneath my brain from there were only at the base of me increasing footholds for the sleep locks to worm their way in — a method that would only continue growing thicker with my body and the further influx of mental junk to feed into my brain — here as an American in America — a size wanting more size.

Still in my unknowing I felt my sleep inside my sleep begin to change — I began to dream in cycles of strange women. Bodies in small rooms that made me vibrate. Women with long fingers and no language, who could affix themselves warm to the inseam of my head. They would look at me in ways no one had looked at me. I began to find myself addicted to that hour. I began to send myself to bed earlier and earlier some evenings, full of feeding, and lie on the bed and wait for how the air would disappear around me — the shift of sleep oncoming in a quick cloak and unknowing, like a candle being snuffed; a wet sack over a large head, with no slither; the liquid underneath the skin.

After stumbling into my first orgasm one night while watching a bikini competition on TV, my dick for days looked deformed — changed, the flesh there made briefly crooked in its initiation rite. The hair there soon shook into growing, pushing stems of cells out of its center, messages sent from my second self. In my bedroom closet I kept a small tan lockbox my sister and I had once used for our imaginary club’s treasury — pretend money held under lock and key. Into the box I placed small totems of obsession, amassing day by day: at first simply clip-outs of the J.C. Penney’s catalog where women posed in mostly safe lingerie, their nipples red dots showing through phrases of linen, posed in eternal ways. The early ecstasy of finding a new catalog had arrived inside the mail, with or without my mom’s name on it, which I would pretend to be interested in for the collar shirts and coats to order. Taking the slick ream into my room in the name of Christmas listing, and locking the door there right behind. Into the box as well I placed a set of four postcards I bought in St. Augustine on family vacation, separating myself from my parents by pretending to want to go buy a book. The most definitive image of these was a topless woman blurred underneath an outdoor shower, the curve of her breasts alone enough to hold my head for hours in its 4" × 6" grip. I took and hid a Polaroid of Pamela Anderson at the contestants’ front podium during her appearance on Family Feud , her shorts cut high up on her orange leg; red, breast-stuffed shirt and bleached hair against the gaudy colors of the show’s set, the hokey male host waiting for her response. Back then I was still new enough inside my glue mind that I could pretend to call home from a friend’s house and ask my mother to tape the day’s episode of Baywatch and it did not seem obscene. Into the box I placed cassette tapes of sound I recorded off of the static-masked high-digit channels on TV. Black spools in clear plastic containing copied aural output from the scrambled women getting fucked. Their grunt and the skin brushing. The very specific sentences and cadence of their verbiage, which won’t come out right on this page. Food or lipstick on their teeth. 3-D to 2-D to 1-D, played back on my white Walkman’s headphones in my room or while mowing our front lawn. Into the box I placed several sheets of tracing paper, writ with images I copied methodically from my father’s adult magazines — a small stack of Penthouse and Playboy he kept in his closet underneath a stack of worn-in shirts. The image replicated on the paper in my still hand, listening through and through the house for someone sensing what I did. Later I would cut select pages out of certain issues — the woman in the orange bikini top showing her bottoms, the woman in red garters and sunglasses: imprinted —careful to leave no trace of where they or I had been.