Of course, I've ever been able to sleep, W. knows that. I can never get a full night's rest, and this is no surprise. I'm up all night, wandering from bedroom to bathroom, eternally disturbed by my own digestive system, eternally awoken and reawoken.
Something inside me won't allow me to sleep, W. says. There's something unsettled, some debt that has to be paid. I'm my own ghost; I haunt myself, looking for some kind of retribution, something that might bring it all to an end, though it will never end.
Yes, that's my insomnia, W. says: the thwarting of the natural sense of an ending – of an end and therefore also of a beginning. My stomach won't allow that, W. says. My disturbed digestive system will allow nothing to end or to begin.
'How many times do you get up at night? 10 times? 20?' He's never experienced anything like it, W. says. He hears me when he visits for the weekend. He's in the living room on the blow up mattress, and there am I, going up and down the hall. Up and down, up and down …
It doesn't wake him up as such, W. says. He would barely remember my eternal trudging, the eternal flushing of the toilet if it did not accord with the restlessness he feels between the walls of my flat. When he gets up, for example, bleary-eyed from drinking … When I clear a space amidst the half-finished wine bottles and cheese packets to make us coffee … When he brushes plaster dust from his jacket …
'What do you think is wrong with you?' But W. knows already. It's not even the damp. It's not even the filth on the kitchen counters or the cans of stale beer. No, they are symptoms of the same ailment. The whole flat is a symptom, my whole life … my very existence on the earth is already a sign.
But it is a sign for him, for W., which he has to decipher. My very existence on the earth is like some kind of cautionary tale. 'No one should live like you', says W. with great vehemence. 'How can you bear it?' He, W., can't bear it. He shouldn't have to.
Why is he drawn back to my flat again and again? Why does he want to see where it happens, or fails to happen? Because nothing ever happens here, does it? Nothing ever goes forward. How can I work in this mess? How can I read, or write?
But of course I never read or write. It would never occur to me. I'm lost a long way behind reading and writing. My inability to read or to write is the least of my worries.
Is this why he works so hard?, W. wonders. Is it his horror at my very existence on the earth that forces him on?
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