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The Dead of
Night
or
Awaken the
Sleepers
by
Bart Alder
Copyright Ó
1999
I remembered
the terror.
I was putting in my false teeth so that I could shave my
moustache off more efficiently, after years of loyal service it was going. I
decided it made me look old. And the thought hit me, no warning, nothing. From the
dark. WHAM!
It astonishes me how much smarter I was as a boy than the
man I came to be. As a boy of five, I was such a spiritual prodigy that I woke
up every morning a little surprised to not be dead.
And right now that same sense of astonishment is doing
laps of my tired old brain, loosening ancient thoughts. I am grasping my
childhood, looking into it through a sacred window, reflecting on who I was and
who I was meant to become. I look in the mirror and the man I was supposed to
become is not there. Somehow I turned into me instead. It’s like I’m awake to
an unfathombly long deception, noticing, remembering.
A boy in terror of the night. Five year old thoughts undo
me. They surround me and challenge
Each night as I lay my small,
apprehensive head down on to a cool pillow, I would feel dread and deathliness
swarm in on my thoughts and take them over. I feared sleep, this strange fading
into nothingness.
I thought that sleep was a place, a palace of prison
cells. A Bastille for the living, a world of cages and souls, with prisoners
pasty and shaking in their tortured slumber. A Bedlam ruled by a demon who
killed children for ten long hours each night. He held us captive and fed on
our life force.
Like a vampyre, this prince of sleep, lord of all darkness would enchant us into exhaustion through the
daylight hours, following us in shadows, turning the screw a little more for
each tick of the daylight clock. Waiting, lurking for night to fall. Preparing
for that time when the restless grow still. Watching us stagger into oblivion,
silence and the dark, opening the prison’s gates, he’d single file us into his
dungeons. With a laugh the size of planets he’d lock the millions of gates
behind us. Hold us in our human coops, sapping our power to feed his special
hunger.
And I thought he created nightmares. He would find a good
and wonderous dream in your heart, and hating the sight of it, would pull it
from your head, twist it and mangle it until it bled only horrors. He’d then
force it back into your mind with a gleeful shove and a frosty grin. It was his
delight to poison all kindness and dredge all life from the living.
The prince of dark was the keeper of all souls at night.
The custodian of our lives. We walked the day only to feed his hunger for our
sleep. The king of all men and women’s hearts, the true power behind our lives,
he let us swim out from his prisons each morning knowing we must return. No person can stay awake
forever.
This dark lord might decide one night, on a whim, that he
could not part with your soul. And that was death. The prince of darkness was
magistrate over which cell doors were opened, which souls were released once
again to world of daylight.
To my childhood self, the dark prince and the dungeons in
which our souls slept were as real and as distant as the daylight sun. As a
child, sleep and death were the same
thing.
As I lay restlessly and hatefully falling out of life and
into sleep, my fearful, little, heart hiding from the dark prince under a
tempting pastry of blankets, I was not sure if it was the little or the great
death which carried me away each night. Would I awaken in the dungeon, or would
I awaken in the light?
Yet there I was, the next morning, waking up, feeling the
slow draining of my inner thoughts into that collective pool where I would swim
about each day. Again the dark prince had commanded the gaols be emptied and he
had benevolently released me spinning back into life.
Spluttering and
groping my way from sleep into wakefulness, like a drunk sailor who awakens to
find themselves in a sunken ship at the bottom of an ocean, I swim upwards to
the air with panic. I would feel only panic at the beginning. As though the
swimmer inside me has been holding his breath that moment too long and sees the
life-giving air above is too far away.
I would want to
cry out in fear but I had yet to find a voice which could make such a sound. I
was not yet returned from death and could not do more than feel the panic of
drowning.
There would be
noise after the panic, then some chatter which would begin to feel familiar,
sensible. Like sounds I might remember having heard once before. Ideas would
soon form, hopes, visions, colours and faces I remembered from fragments of
half forgotten dreams. And then from that lake of noise and light, meaning would come to vanquish the
darkness and the fury. The tingle of fear would fade as, still without breath I
could see the oxygen above me, the air, the daylight now within reach.
I, the drowning swimmer of the lake, would finally
surface, feeling those thoughts and hearing the inner and outer sounds in a
wakeful way. Eyes now free to open, body free to roam the daylight, the
sensations of panic slowly fading under the stern mockery of the sun. The feel
of the mattress below me, the dimensions of my room all familiar, beckoning a
past I seemed to remember so well and so suddenly. My life had been returned
from death. A magical show. A spectacle. The discovery of hidden treasure.
Thinking again,
feeling again, still alive. Still not
dead. Noticing always with a thread
of wary surprise - there was still a swimmer who could swim. I was awake again,
not dead in that prison of souls. It was both a relief and a shock, a mystery
and a wonder.
There is still a world with me in it. Whatever I
am, and I’m truly not sure what that is any longer, I persist in not dying.
I am older now,
old enough to have been jaded by the years of sleep into trusting the demon. At
some point - and I do not remember when it happened but I fear I was very young
- I began to accept that I would return each morning from the silence of night.
That the demon in fact never existed. There was only the sun. Only the light.
Sleep was no mystery and falling into it gave me no concern.
It was a long pause
between blinks. Sleep was all that separated me from more responsibility, more
effort, more toil, more food and drink, more money, more more and always more.
It was not any longer a bringer of small doses of regular death, nor a reminder
of the value of life. Somehow, when I woke each morning I forgot to be surprised that there was a world to wake up to, and a
me waking into it. When that happened, when I forgot to notice I was even
alive, I truly died, the swimmer
drowned for a while and a boring, plodding zombie took his place on this earth.
I had such dreams
as a child for the person I would become and yet the years wore me solidly down
so that I never became nor decided to become anyone. I simply wound up as me by default. Life pushed me around
like a dead fish in a strong river. I never struggled against the water, never
tried to move upstream, never ran with the current towards the beckoning
oceans. I just floated at the top. Went where the water dragged me.
The zombied days
piled on top of each other, my mind forgot all the hopes, which it had once
expected me to remember forever. I was a dead man still breathing, dead and no
longer hoping, no longer caring, no longer alive. Merely a creature of routine,
sorry and sad little routines which I hated and despised, yet continued in that
zombie-like way. Habit became my only counsel. I floated in that river, passing
under a new bridge each year, never once deciding where I might like to go,
content to be a victim of currents and turbulance.
I look back now
and wonder when this change came upon me, how young was I when I stopped
thinking about my life as a fragile thing? When did I throw away my destiny for
a life of comfortably floating dead? Too young. Younger than twenty, I must
have been.
When did the
grinding of time wear my thoughts so smooth that life flowed over me without my
even noticing? When did I become content to have merely survived another day of
toil and sadness. When did I decide that floating like a dead fish was ever enough? When did I succumb to the
indifference and insanity?
When did I start
to congratulate myself for merely surviving another day of earning cash, paying
bills and collapsing in front of the television in a beer soaked stupor? When
did it become my only challenge to remain as inert as possible without dying of
boredom?
When did silence
begin to terrify me? When did I begin to surrounded myself with clutter and
activity, noise and action so that I would never have to open my eyes to myself
and all the ghastly emptiness around me?
I am an old man
suddenly. Too old to stare at my reflection and be fooled any more by what I
see. I noticed my real age, saw my real life for the first time this very
morning. There was a zombie looking back at me in the mirror, shaving cream on
his face, false teeth hanging out, razor in one hand and tears on his cheeks.
Old and changed,
wrinkles in large swarms now hang about my face uninvited, my thin bones creak
against my worn cartilidge whenever I move. My hair, having once covered my scalp
proudly with black, now clings on desperately above my ears and around the back
of my head in single grey loop. On top there is nothing but skin.
They count time
in years in this place. They have calenders and clocks, they have sundials and
shadows. They measure these days that pass with numbers and crosses on a page.
The piece of paper declaring my birth to the world assures me that sixty such
years have passed since I was born.
But to me the
only time is suddenly the now in which I am alive. Not the sixty years which
have supposedly passed - they are a dream of nothing. I wasn’t even alive for
most of them. The past, my past, is now like a memory from a life which I
wasn’t supposed to have lived. I feel lost in it, as though my own life is a
unwelcomed stranger.
Time is not like
a calendar or a watch to me all of a sudden. It’s like a countdown instead. It’s like waiting once again to die. It’s
remembering to feel alive in the first place. It’s the now that matters. In the
now I am alive because each thought is a choice, an option. To swim or drown. I
can swim against a tidal wave of opinion if only I choose.
For how long have
I been walking the earth like a dead man, fogetting the thrill of living at
all? I spent decades floating in this half dead life, not living, yet moving
under bridges, eating, sleeping and dreaming away the weeks, each day a new
time of forgetting to live for the sheer fuck of it.
I took life for
granted while I had it firmly in my youthful grasp. Only now in my twilight
when I can’t feel youth or power as I once did, do I have any feeling of
living. Only now that I am old do I remember how it felt to be a child, in awe
of life, in awe of breath, in awe of flowers and trees, in awe of all things
living and all things dead.
So much wasted
life. So much time unfathomably leaked between my fingers like grains of the
most precious sand. I took a long blink and opened my eyes to find that sixty
whole years of sand had slipped away while my eyes were closed and me none the
wiser.
As if my eyes
opened twice today, as though I had a second pair of eyelids which had stayed
clamped and sealed all this time. When those second eyelids finally opened,
here I was again, a young boy, fearful of sleep, aware of life, but now in the
body of a decaying old man.
They will call it
a mid-life crisis I have no doubt. People do like to make things seem simpler
than they are. But this is not a mid-life for me. I am sixty and will certainly
not survive to a hundred and twenty given the number of fatty foods that zombie
poured into my neglected body. Nor is it strictly a crisis. This is the time of
reckoning. I walked through life mostly asleep and now I am awake again. The
mid-life crisis just ended.
My only fear is that I will forget this
moment, that now with life a lucid and spectacular thing, I will desend once
again into that mental fog in which I dwelt for all those decades of ruin. The
current crisis, if I can call it
that, is to figure out how I can remain in this brightened and vivid world
having so newly arrived. How do I awaken each day and open these second
eyelids? Are there more as well, are there perhaps third and fourth eyelids to
be opened?
So I write my thoughts down furiously - as quickly as I
can manage to think them. The zombie lies slain here today, but there is always the chance that he will once
again awaken in my head on some sad tomorrow. I will once again lay dormant and
these words I write now may be the only things which force me back into life,
which open my second eyelids again.
There is always the chance that I will need to stand up
and slay the zombie a thousand times. If I must kill a thousand zombies then so
be it. These words are my mantra, my spell insuring against his return. I am
more afraid of returning to my old life and living to a hundred than of dying
in this new one tomorrow.
I also need to think upon my past, I need to recover my
childish dreams, my hopes, my ambitions and see which ones I can still achieve.
It is my hope that writing these thoughts down will begin to unravel this old
me and that by writing and staying awake in this new life, I will remember who
I was always meant to be.
I have scorned all my hopes. For years I laughed as
others, fools I called them then, gave up all common sense things in the chase
for their naked and uncertain dreams.
I watched on as scores failed, I laughed and choked on
delight as they conceeded defeat, came around to my dead way of seeing. I mocked
their dreams and now the mockery comes back with years of savage spin and pace on
it and scores a direct hit on me. Right between my two frontal lobes the
thought hits and I am undone by the power of the truth. They were right to
dream, they were the alive, they were right to try to live their hopes and I
who stood in defiance of hope, I was the fool all along.
How can I describe the disgust I feel at myself? How many
people could I have helped to dream, how many people could I have wanted to
succeed in their chosen lives? How many dreams of my own could I have realised?
How many dreams of others did I destroy with my bitterness and stupidity? Here
I lie in the decay of time and think only of what could have been if only I had risked some failure. Risked the scorn
of men like myself, risked death so that I might actually feel alive.
But I am not truly miserable either at this moment. I
don’t feel as though I should stay a
sorry man. I cannot see a future in hating myself for all my past idiocies. I
had my second eyelids closed. What hope was there for me to see?
I am sixty years from my beginning, that is true, but I am
not yet ended either. There is still time left for me to dream on and live as
though my dreams and me are the same thing. I might breathe another twenty
years of wriggling into that dead fish and get it to swim a little upstream
yet.
What can a man do with twenty years? He might build an
empire in that time. He might forge a new life for thousands. He might live
sixty years of death and then dream and swim twenty years of good life and so die a contented thing.
Twenty years or twenty minutes? What is my countdown? A funny thing, the future. I cannot know what
futures beckon, all I can do now that I remember to be alive is to enjoy the
all the nows I have left.
I walk out my front door today uncertain for the first
time in years where I will be tonight when I lay my head fearfully on a pillow.
I wonder to myself only how many eyelids will open tomorrow? What dreams can I
hope for?
I feel my body moving against the stream
already. And suddenly, I am out the door, down the road, swimming against the
tide, laughing with joy to finally have a direction - even if I do not yet know
what bearing that direction is actually in. I’ll find direction somewhere along
the way. For now it just feels good to be moving again.