When You Can't [nate]

I
When you can’t sleep your kitchen is always clean. So is your car, your living room, your bedroom, and anywhere else you can get your hands on. When you can’t sleep your hair is always clean. Clean, though, is all a matter of perspective. My hair is clean, yes, because with the amount of time gained from not sleeping, I found myself showering quite often. My hands, though, while clean to the eye, were dirty the moment I plotted the death of the man Stacy is now living with, and when I acted on it, they could never be clean again.

II
When you can’t sleep you replay events over and over. When I walked in on Stacy with a different man, the first thing I said was, “Hello.” Since then, I’ve thought of thousands of different things I could have said. At the beginning, for the first few nights after it happened, I imagined violence. I thought of things to scream and what in the area I could have thrown and whether I could have taken the guy if it came down to that. I remembered the way the blinds were closed in the bedroom. His pants were lying on the floor, bundled up against the closet, thrown from the bed. I remember my wife’s eyes, and the way she stared, and how she didn’t say a word. It was the thought of those eyes that turned me from violence to remorse, and I thought of new things I could have said. It was in these deepest moments of remorse that I began to imagine exactly how I would do it, replaying each step in my head. When you can’t sleep you become a master of imagination.

III
“James, I’m calling the police,” she said.

“Please don’t,” I said.

IV
When you can’t sleep you have plenty of time to plan. At first I planned new shelves for my kitchen. Once they were built, I painted every wall in my new apartment. This led me to redoing the floors in the entire place. When you can’t sleep, you learn to plan. You learn to account for all variables. You learn that you need to be prepared for anything to happen. You learn to buy extra paint, a couple extra pieces of flooring for the times you cut wrong, and you learn how to react when your ex-wife comes home three hours early from work and you’re standing in her kitchen with a handgun shoved in the back of your pants. You don’t expect these things to happen, but you plan for them. You know when she says, “What are you doing here?” you can say, and mean it, “I just wanted to talk to you.” You know she won’t want to talk, and you can get out safely.

V
Sometimes, when you can’t sleep you make new friends. The apartment complex I live in is made up about seven or so separate two-story buildings that all hold four apartments. Two on top, two on bottom. There is a pool and office building in the middle. On nights where I could not stand the dark and empty silence of my apartment I would walk the slinking sidewalks that stretch between the buildings joining them together. It was these walks that lead me to meeting Richard, the groundskeeper for the apartment.

Richard is a habitually sick man. He explained this to me on one of the first times I met him. He said that it is not something that has come with his age, but has been a part of his life for as long as he can remember. He explained that it feels like an endless rotation. Wake up with some new ailment, go to a doctor, run tests, take pills, feel better, and wake up sick. He was married too, once, but that ended quickly. I instantly felt I could trust him. I told him everything.

VI
When you can’t sleep you question yourself. On those nights, sitting up in bed, I wondered if it was all my fault. I thought that maybe, perhaps, I was preparing to kill the wrong person.

VII
“James, you have a gun,” she said.

“I know, I’m sorry. I wasn’t even going to do it,” I said.

VIII
Sometimes I imagined that I did attack.

“What the fuck,” I would shout. My wife would quickly pull the sheets up to her chest and he would scramble for his pants across the room. As he stumbles forward, I catch him in the chest with my knee. This would send him flying backwards onto the bed and I would grab the lamp from the nightstand and smash it across his face, all the while my wife would scream.

The attack played differently every time. Sometimes, I would catch him before he even got out of bed. Sometimes, it began with shouting and escalated to punches thrown. When you can’t sleep you’re the toughest man in the room.

IX
When you can’t sleep the ability to reason is lost.

“You see man,” Richard said, watering some flowers, “when the body defies the mind, it’s heartbreaking.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Take an athlete for example. An Olympic runner. They train their whole lives for one race. When they get to that race, they know they are the best. To them, no one is better. But when that gun goes off and they fail to even place, they can’t understand.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” I said.

“Everything. I’ve done it a million times. Every time I wake up sick, I’m prepared. I know the routine. But you, you’ve got it backwards.”

X
I went over every detail. At precisely 2:00 P.M on Tuesday, September 13th, I would enter his house through the back door. By 2:04 I would have found him, most likely working in his bedroom. I would lead him, at gunpoint, to the basement so no one will hear the shots. At 2:07 I would force him to apologize. By 2:10 I would have fired two shots into his chest, and one into his head. By 2:15 I would have pulled the car back into his garage, and removed the tarp from my trunk. I would leave the trunk open. The body would be wrapped in the tarp. By 2:30 I would have drag the body out of the basement, and shut it in my trunk. Before leaving, I would dismantle the handgun into three different pieces. The first part, the clip, would be discarded on the highway approximately ten miles from the on-ramp near his house. The second part, the barrel, which can be removed quite easily with the press of two simple buttons, would be thrown into the river while crossing. The third, and final part, the handle and firing mechanism, would be buried fifty yards from where I would be burying the body, at approximately, depending on traffic, 3:15. By 3:45 I will be home, and my problem would be solved.

XI
The inability to sleep is typically the side effect of some larger problem. In women, the increase in hormones before and after menopause can affect sleep. So can drug use and abuse. A change in environment or sleeping conditions can hurt your ability to sleep. Jet lag can too. Schizophrenia, bipolar disease, post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and a whole slew of other mental problems can result in a lack of sleep. There is a rare intestinal parasite that can hinder sleep. An over active mind and large amounts of stress are not conducive to sleeping. When you can’t sleep you have plenty of time to do research.

XII
When you can’t sleep you miss your dreams. Richard tried telling me that sometimes it is better to live in our dreams and our thoughts and our ideas rather than the real world. I told him that I couldn’t, the real was all I had.

XIII
“Well then what should I do?” she said.

“I’ll just leave, this never happened,” I said.

XIV
Around 2:00 AM one morning I heard a knock on my door. It was Richard. He looked awful.

“I knew you’d be up,” he said.

“You ok?” I said.

“Look, can you take me to the hospital? I don’t know what it is, but I feel like shit. I don’t feel like driving,” he said.

“Should I call an ambulance?” I said.

“Don’t bother. You could use something to do anyway,” he said.

XV
When you can’t sleep you try everything. Sleeping pills don’t work. They just make you incoherent. Soothing music is a distraction. I rented movies. I tried writing. I got so drunk that I spent two hours in the bathroom puking.

XVI
I don’t like to think about what really happened. I don’t like that I said hello and my wife stared at me coldly and the man slowly got off of her and lay down beside her and I turned and walked out of the house and drove to my parents to sleep on the couch in the basement.

In truth, I like to imagine that I simply said, then and there, “Why?”

XVII
“You know I can’t do that,” she said.

“Please? Look, this was a mistake, I know. I mean, I haven’t been sleeping much lately and-“

XVIII
The smell of the hospital made me nauseous. When I found Richard’s room, he was asleep. He was connected to several machines. I woke him up.

“How ya feeling?” I said.

“Oh, not much right now, honestly. They’ve got me on so much different shit.”

“Must be nice,” I said.

“You going to go through with it?” he said.

“Yes. I think so,” I said.

Richard sighed and rubbed one of the tubes connected to his arm in between his fingers.

“You think you’re the first man to lose his wife?” he said.

“No, I know, I mean, I know you –“

He sat up a little bit in his bed.

“If you’re going to kill him, why don’t you shoot her too?” he said.

“Look, the sarcasm is not going to help,” I said.

“No really, why don’t you go kill all the men who have ever slept with someone’s wife. Will that make you feel better?” he said.

“What am I supposed to do then?” I said.

“Get some sleep,” he said, and a nurse came in and switched the IV bag and I left.

XIX
When you can’t sleep you talk to God. You ask him who’s right and who’s wrong and what to do and how to do it. You ask him if it’s right to kill, sometimes. You ask everything you’ve ever wanted to ask, and when you receive no answer, you ask even more. You try to fight back any notion of self-realization that there are people around the world that are suffering more than you and you resolve to do what has to be done regardless and then maybe, just maybe, you can go to sleep.

XX
I was standing in his kitchen when she walked in. He wasn’t even home. I had waited for over an hour for him when she came in. She didn’t believe I was there to talk. She thought I was there to do something childish, like break or steal something. When I turned to try and leave, she saw the gun. This was not something I had planned. She was remarkably calm.

XXI
When you can’t sleep you stare at the clock.

XXII
“James, seriously, a gun? Who were you planning to shoot?”

“I wasn’t going to shoot anyone.”

“How can you stand there and lie to me? You’re holding a gun. Was it me or him?”

“Him.”

“You think this is his fault? You’re worse than ever.”

“But –“

“You know what? No, just go. Go back to your little apartment.”

XXIII
When I got home, Richard was watering some plants outside my apartment. He looked fine.

“You O.K?” I said.

“Yeah, I’m fine, of course,” he said and turned and looked at me, “How did it go?”

“He wasn’t home. She caught me,” I said.

“She let you go? Nice woman,” he said.

I started to walk towards my apartment door.

“Gonna try again?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Standing inside, I looked out the window, and saw Richard happily coiling the length of hose, and I looked around my apartment, and decided the floor really could use a good cleaning.