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By Root 14656 0

I wanted, and let all the pictures of things a man might want to run through my head, coffee, a girl, money, a drink, white sand and blue water, and let them all slide off, one after another, like a deck of cards slewing slowly off your hand. Maybe the things you want are like cards. You don’t want them for themselves, really, though you think you do. You don’t want a card because you want a card, but because in a perfectly arbitrary system of rules and values and in a special combination of which you already hold a part the card has meaning. But suppose you aren’t sitting in a game. Then, even if you do know the rules, a card doesn’t mean a thing. They all look alike.

So I could lie there, though I knew that I would get up after a spell–not deciding to get up but just all at once finding myself standing in the middle of the floor just as later on I would find myself, with a mild shock of recognition, taking coffee, changing a bill, handling a girl, drawing on a drink, floating in the water. Like an amnesia case playing solitaire in a hospital. I would get up and deal myself a hand, all right. Later on. But for the present I would lie there and know I didn’t have to get up, and feel the holy emptiness and blessed fatigue of a saint after the dark night of the soul. For God and Nothing have a lot in common. You look either one of Them straight in the eye for a second and the immediate effect on the human constitution is the same.

Lots of nights I would go the bed early, too. Sometimes sleep gets to be a serious and complete thing. You stop going to sleep in order that you may be able to get up, but get up in order that you may be able to go back to sleep. You get so during the day you catch yourself suddenly standing still and waiting and listening. You are like a little boy at the railroad station, ready to go away on the train, which hasn’t come yet. You look way up the track, but can’t see the little patch of black smoke yet. You fidget around, but all at once you stop in the middle of you fidgeting, and listen. You can’t hear it yet. Then you go and kneel down in your Sunday clothes in the cinders, for which your mother is going to snatch you bald-headed, and put your ear to the rail and listen for the first soundless rustle which will come in the rail long before the little black patch begins to grow on the sky. You get so you listen for night, long before it comes over the horizon, and long, long before it comes charging and stewing and thundering to you like a big black locomotive and the black cars grind to a momentary stop and the porter with the black, shining face helps you up the steps, and says, “Yassuh, little boss, yassuh.”

You don’t dream in that kind of sleep, but you are aware of it every minute you are asleep, as though were having a long dream of sleep itself, and in that sleep you were dreaming of sleep, sleeping and dreaming of sleep infinitely inward into the center.

That was the way it was for a while after I didn’t have any job. It wasn’t new. It had been like that before, twice before. I had even given a name to it–The Great Sleep. The time before I quit the University, just a few months before I was supposed to finish my dissertation for the Ph.D. in American History. It was almost finished, and they said it was O.K. The sheets of typed-on paper were stacked up on the table by the typewriter. The boxes f cards were there. I would get up late in the morning and see them there, the top sheet of paper beginning to curl up around the paperweight. And I’d see them there when I came in after supper to go to bed. Finally, one morning I got up late and went out the door and didn’t come back and left them there. And the other time the Great Sleep had come was the time before I walked out the apartment and Lois started to get the divorce.

But this time there wasn’t any American History and there wasn’t any Lois. But there was the Great Sleep.

When I did get up I just piddled around. I went to movies and hung around speak-easies and went swimming or went out to the country club and lay on the grass and