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By Root 876 0

’s half Oscar and half me, and I’ll be thinking about the baby’s name, and I’ll hear somebody outside, somebody who’s, like, approaching the front door, and maybe it’ll look like Harry and Esther’s son Aaron, who they’ve been waiting for all this time, who had previously invisibled himself but now has reappeared. He’ll come to the door, he’ll come in, they’ll welcome him back, but it’ll be me who’ll know who he really is. Once someone has bound your heart, he’s the only person who can let it loose again. I’m waiting, Charlie. I’m patient. I don’t ever want my heart unchained, except by him.

The song was right, sweet Jesus. Here’s your lemonade.

Ain’t no grave will hold his body down.

Our life is no dream, but ought to be and perhaps will become so.

— NOVALIS

POSTLUDES

“YOU’RE NOT really going to start your book with a character waking up in bed, are you? That’s the first rule, isn’t it? Don’t start a story with a character waking up in bed?”

Bradley’s words.

But yes: I am going to do that. I am going to break that particular rule.

I RISE FROM THE BENCH and start to make my way back around the periphery of Allmendinger Park. Year after year I have come to this spot to wait out the particular nights that are radiant with the moon, and voices, and wakefulness. Here and there, mostly on the other side of the street, are the restless joggers, who I first assume are all insomniacs but who on second thought are probably night workers, nocturnal laborers, home from their jobs and eager to get some exercise before they shower and bed down for a day’s sleep. Overhead, a slight breeze riffles the branches, and the air smells of the white pines to my right through which the wind has passed. One of the lyrical consolations of insomnia is that the sufferer becomes acquainted with the special luminous emptiness of 4 A.M., these spectral stirrings when, just before dawn, the spirits seem to be abroad and are moving slowly toward you for reassurance. As I walk, I notice that the few joggers who are out here are all men. The women are afraid to jog at this time of night, wary of assault. No, I’m wrong: there’s one very slender woman wearing a Toledo Mud Hens baseball cap and clutching a small can of pepper spray in her right hand. She jogs by, hardly bothering to look at me, intent on her times, probably a marathoner.

I fear we shall out-sleep the coming

morn

As much as we this night have

overwatch’d.

This palpable-gross play hath well

beguiled

The heavy gait of night. Sweet

friends, to bed.

Interesting that that play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, like Macbeth, has insomnia as one of its many dramatic subjects, though the comedy is concerned with summer love insomnia and treats it with calm sweetness, while the tragedy’s sleeplessness, by contrast, is a container for guilt and has the feeling of desperate and cursed winter about it: insomnia as icy cold criminal mania, the arrival of the moving woods, the stalking trees, the hoarfrost. Not all insomnias are alike, as any victim of this condition knows very well.

I TURN THE CORNER and approach Michigan Stadium. A grandiose new cast-iron and brick fence surrounds it, and a high gate. You can’t get into this place anymore without a ticket and certainly not at night. These days, you can’t wander in and out during the summer or any other off-season. Too bad. Large construction machines block the west entryway into the stands. All this construction work has to be completed by the time football season begins. During the day I can hear the machines, distantly churning, from my study window. This stadium has become even more monumental, with enormous steel girders poking up above the current highest tier to support an additional section of new seating and a seven-million-dollar scoreboard. Around the upper reaches of the stadium’s exterior are some words in gigantic maize-and-blue-colored lettering, but with most of the phrase invisible from here:

HAIL TO THE CONQUE

At the corner, the stoplight is blinking red in one direction (north-south) and amber in the