Rick Moody - Hotels of North America

After rugged individualism (2), there was the period of marital sleeping known as staggered shifts (3). Staggered shifts appeared at first to be a mere extension of personal preference, and who can quarrel with personal preference, which is one of the hallmarks of American life. If one of them wanted to go to bed well before the other one wanted to go to bed, who could object, because the day would come when they could retreat back to rugged individualism, it was right there waiting to be re-employed, and so staggered shifts should not be interpreted as some kind of loss, some kind of giving up. There were occasions during the period of staggered shifts when, out of the murk of semiconsciousness, they occasionally found themselves lovemaking, my God, so unsuspected and sweet, and it wasn’t as if they had forgotten all that they knew about the adventure of meeting a new body and mapping its latitudes, its tastes. Suddenly, they were awake and alive, and they had cast off the staggered shifts, or perhaps triumphed over them, and they were goading each other on and it was good, and because they were lovemaking they went back, as through time, to the tangle of limbs.

Well, it’s my duty to tell you that the middle-of-the-night lovemaking was on the temporary side, or rather the episodes of this old skill diminished, grew infrequent, and soon, it was not just that they went to bed at different times (3), it was that they also awakened at different times (3.5), and didn’t even know that lovely pre- and postsomnolence fumbling that is a couple trying to brush its teeth and change in and out of the outfits of the day; all of this became something that they each did alone, while the other was either asleep or out in an adjacent room gazing catatonically at a television. And in this manner, the period of staggered shifts (3) in turn gave way to haphephobia (4) — one of those half-Latinate and half-Greek technical terms — wherein one of the two of them did not want to be touched by the other (and these roles occasionally shifted) and would recoil if touching was introduced. Sometimes this would be the simplest physical interaction of all — in trying to arrange a pillow, one of them briefly made contact. The recoiling was immediate in the eyes of the one touched, this touched party gazing vapidly as though the touching party, the grazing party, were a stranger, just someone that he or she might meet in an airport dining establishment; the look would linger, the gaze of strangers, in this stage of sleeping known as haphephobia, whereby intimates are reconstructed as strangers, and not the kind who are alluring but the kind who you go out of your way to avoid brushing against, as if the person you shared a bed with were one of those unfortunates with the eight soiled Target bags getting on the subway in August, drenched in perspiration and long past a last bath, and heading for the seat next to you. In this case, the look hovered there for a moment until you realized that in fact you were married to the person a few feet away, and you had been in love with him or her for years, or that is what you said, and having bestowed on him or her the gaze of haphephobia, you cycled through eleven kinds of discomfort which I do not have time to catalog now and went back to the business of trying to sleep.

Except that haphephobia (4) is followed in turn by the period of clinically diagnosed somatic sleep disorders (5), which clamor into the contested sleep space like some colony of metaphysical prairie dogs, chattering constantly, keeping you both from making any progress in trying to move backward toward the tangle of limbs or even rugged individualism. The clinically diagnosed somatic sleep disorders are acute at first, and chronic thereafter, and they take all your waking time to deal with, as well as much of your sleeping time, so that you are exactly in the obverse of the tangle of limbs (where lovemaking is the space between waking and sleep). Now, clinically diagnosed somatic sleep disorders are some never-ending demilitarized zone between the two great estates, waking and dreaming, and these clinically diagnosed somatic sleep disorders are incredibly lonely. Especially lonely are the hours between three and four ante meridiem when you are next to your spouse but instead of thinking about love you are thinking about particularly invasive cancers, like pancreatic cancer or inoperable brain cancer. (In fact, clinically diagnosed somatic sleep disorders are basically a wakefulness-promotion system that in turn generates thoughts of pancreatic cancer.)

Sometimes in this system, actual physical complaints, like the aforementioned back pain, are converted into obsessional patterns of wakefulness, wherein a minor complaint becomes a symptom of a major medical disorder — back pain a symptom of cirrhosis, or headache a sign of brain cancer — and these obsessional patterns of wakefulness generate the need, the next day, for a convulsive nap (6), which is one of the things you should never ever do, nap, at least not if you are trying to get back to the halcyon period of the tangle of limbs, because convulsive napping only makes the clinically diagnosed somatic sleep disorders worse, and the napping, because it comes over you like a paroxysm, must be solitary, is always solitary, and always somewhat embarrassing. It’s almost like you don’t sleep with the person in question, your spouse, at all, because you are never in the bed at the same time as he or she is in the bed; instead, you are struggling with and against the bed, with and against the idea of sleep, with and against the good things that are associated with sleep, and this can go on for years. You pass the spouse, whom you now think of as a reasonably good friend, in the interior spaces of your address without comment. You cannot even begin to describe the horror of the cycle that is clinically diagnosed somatic sleep disorders and convulsive napping because you have not had enough sleep to describe anything at all.

And this gives way, as you knew it must, to the medical diagnosis of sleep apnea (5.5), bestowed upon you by the practitioner of internal medicine. The diagnosis has to do with your weight, the practitioner of internal medicine cautions, or with your genetic chemistry, or with sheer chance, or with adenoids, and you may need to have your adenoids removed and your tonsils shorn away, and in the meantime, you simply need to wear this mask and be attached to this tank, which will, at regular intervals, keep you breathing. This condition is very similar to the chronic snoring (5.75) that your partner now exhibits, your friend who was once your tangle of limbs. One of you has chronic snoring, which is sort of a chthonic snoring, and that has to do with the uvula in most cases, and the other of you has sleep apnea, and so in the rare instances that you do inhabit a room at the same time, you mainly keep each other awake, so even if you weren’t preoccupied with pancreatic cancer you would not sleep because of the near-death experiences, and that is how the two of you sleep now, with the mask and the tank. Even dogs will refuse to sleep in the room with you.

And now you are embarked on a weekend in Toledo, Ohio, for the marriage of a niece, and you are going to stay in a hotel together in Maumee, because it’s cheaper than Toledo, and isn’t next to a strip club, which is apparently the case with virtually every hotel in Toledo. You are a couple who cycle between stages 5 and 6 on the marital sleep chart, not quite having gotten to the cessation of biological function (7), though this is a misnomer in some senses, as certain somatic activities continue after the cessation of biological function; for example, cessation of electrical activity in the brain does not necessarily imply a total cessation. A heartbeat may linger on.