Briefing for a Descent Into Hell - Doris May Lessing [59]
Sleep.
He doesn’t sleep well doctor, he needs a pill.
The small days flicker and the nights are killed dead with Pills. But he sleeps well, he is healthy and regulated and good.
And now the greatest drug of them all, the sweet dream, sweet night dreams and sweeter day dreams, I dream of Jeannie with the light brown hair and wide-apart legs like loving arms.
And now I’m grown and gone, and I work and play all regulated ordered and social and correct, and I sleep now less than I ever did in my life for this short brief blissful time, just away from that bed the family, before I become that feather bed the family, and I’m young and my dreams and living are all one, white arms around my neck and I drown, I drown, she and I, he and I, down among the dead men. Down.
Oh doctor can you give me a pill to make me sleep. Oh, I’m working too hard and Oh, I’m worried about my marriage, and oh I’m worried about my job, and oh I can’t stand what I think. Oh give me a pill and give me a drink and give me a smoke and give me dope, give me enough food to knock me silly, give me now everything I had when I was baby, give me what you trained me to need before I even talked or walked, give me anything you like, but let me SLEEP for in the dark where the door once was (but is it still?) is the place I can tolerate being alive at all. I never learned to live awake. I was trained for sleep. Oh let me sleep and sleep my life away. And if the pressure of true memory wakes me before I need, if the urgency of what I should be doing stabs into my sleep, then for God’s sake doctor, for goodness sake, give me drugs and put me back to dreaming again.
And now life is wearing thin and as it reaches the end the drugs are wearing thinner, less life for loving, less room for food, less stomach for drink, and sleep is harder to reach and thinner, and sleeping is no longer the Drop into the black pit all oblivion until the alarm clock, no, sleep is thin and fitful and full of memories and reminders and the dark is never dark enough and
Give me pills, give me more pills. I MUST SLEEP.
No, I don’t enjoy my nights reading thinking talking and simply being alive, no, I want to sleep, I have to sleep.
In a long narrow ward where sixty old men in charity pyjamas are put to bed like infants for the night at nine o’clock by institution nurses, the nurse goes around, with sixty doses of SLEEP.
SLEEP WELL.
In the outpatients of a million hospitals, in the consulting rooms of a million million medicoes, a million million million hands are stretched out,
Doctor give me pills to make me sleep.
SLEEP WELL.
As the earth revolves, one half always in the dark, from the dark half rises up a wail, oh I can’t sleep, I want to sleep, I don’t sleep enough, but give me pills to make me sleep, give me alcohol to make me sleep, give me sex to make me sleep.
SLEEP WELL.
In mental hospitals where the millions who have cracked, making cracks where the light could shine through at last, the pills are like food pellets dropped into battery chickens’ food hoppers, SLEEP, the needles slide into the outstretched arms, SLEEP, the rubber tubes strapped to arms drip, SLEEP.
SLEEP, for you are not yet dead.
I must wake up.
I have to wake up.
I can feel myself struggling and fighting as if I were sunk a mile deep in thick dragging water but far above my head in the surface shallows I can see sunlanced waves where the glittering fishes dance and swim, oh let me rise, let me come up to the surface like a cork or a leaping porpoise into the light. Let me fly like a flying fish, a fish of light.
They hold me down, they cradle me down, they hush and they croon, SLEEP and you’ll soon be well.
I fight to rise, I struggle as if I were a mile under heavy sour black earth and above the earth slabs of stone, I fight so hard and I shout, No, no, no, no, don’t, I won’t, I don’t want, let me wake, I must wake up, but
Shhhhhh, hush, SLEEP and in slides