The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore - Benjamin Hale [82]
XVIII
Before going further I should mention Lydia’s periodic bouts with insomnia, and the related phenomenon of her terrible headaches.
Lydia was the sort of person who presented such a thick outward mask of composure to the daytime world that every demon that she quickly buried in her brain during the sunlit hours would come out to haunt her at night, sometimes costing her sleep.
Usually she slept well enough. But once in a while, maybe ten or eleven times a year, the red-eyed monster of sleeplessness would drive Hypnos from her bed for a string of nights sometimes lasting up to a week. These insomniac fits were usually triggered by her menstrual cycle. Almost every time she experienced her “period,” Lydia would swoon with headaches—migraines. These migraine headaches, as I understand from her descriptions of them, were brutal skullbusters that made her feel as if she had a hatchet embedded in her head for several days straight, cleaving her two lobes straight down the braincrack, severing the corpus callosum, splitting the hemisphere of things from the hemisphere of symbols, each eye seeing things somewhat differently, edges failing to match up, seeing double—and this was accompanied by a cacophony of humming, gnashing, burning, chewing, grating, sawing, and buzzing noises in her head that sounded (she said) like heavy industry, like a lot of noises you might hear in a tank factory. Her eyes were also hypersensitive to light when these attacks occurred, and when the headaches were besieging her with their worst, she would lie on the bed all day with an ice pack on her head, her shoes off, and the blinds drawn shut to the world beyond the bedroom.
She would rest but would not sleep, because the headaches were so horrific that they would not lend her a moment of peace long enough to let her fall asleep. Sometimes she got lucky, and those nearly monthly brain-blitzes failed, for whatever mysterious reason, to happen—but usually she could tell her period was coming because those headaches served as the grim harbingers of looming uterine discharge, warning her a day or two in advance. Then the headaches worsened at the peak of her three days’ bloodletting and left in their wake another three days of insomnia. I think the insomnia may have had something to do with all the Excedrin Lydia took during the time of the headaches. Extra-Strength Excedrin Migraine tablets were the only painkillers stalwart enough to even begin to quell the tempests that raged nightly in her skull, and perhaps she overmedicated herself, took too much of it, and it kept her awake, and she stayed awake, became moody, easily given to tears, emotionally haywire, would spend her nights alert and tormented, with her brain, I know, playing and replaying every regret and mistake in her life, every flare-up of fury or subjection to humiliation, until her heart rattled against her ribs like a broken machine and the light in the room shifted from orange to blue-gray and the streets outside became reanimated with the—to her—threatening and depressing sounds of early morning traffic and tweeting birds, which meant she would now be forced to face the coming day in this state, knowing that the closest she had managed to come to sleep was a sort of rollicking seasickness accompanied by a lurid zoetrope of nauseating images sliding across the screen of her inner eyelids, more like hallucinations than dreams.
And then, after the headaches and the menstruation, followed by the insomnia, the only way to reregulate her circadian rhythm was to take these heavy-duty sleeping pills, for which she had a special prescription. And when she took one of those pills she would sleep like a corpse and could not have been woken even if the house was on fire. After a few nights of this, she was finally back on her biological track and she would be fine for another few weeks, until the headaches reemerged and the whole cycle