Notes from a Hypersomniac

I

Last week I stuck my son in the scalp with a sewing pin. He did not scream. He did not cry. He said, What was that thing, Mama?

The boy sat with me at the table, in my lap, and I hunched around him, patching over the couch’s slipcover with navy pinstripe wool. It was tedious work, slow and squinting. My fingertips throbbed from pushing pinheads into and through the dark thick fabric. One dubious husband watched from a distance, sure I would finish with my rudimentary seamstress skills what the two dogs had begun, namely the ruination of our upholstery. Over the course of a week, I had almost completed the project, which had absorbed every free moment of my spring break, and with a nearly-three-year-old (the son on my lap) and a nearly-one-year-old (the son upstairs sleeping), the term free moment does not mean what it used to, which is to say, it is roughly ten quadrillion times more valuable: as in, God help you if you happen upon me in a free moment and have need of me. I will be the Levite who crosses to the other side of the road. I will walk right by your stripped-bare, beat-up, half-dead ass so I can attend to my sewing project, my pantoum, the stew of homemade probiotics, the DIY compost bin.

On, off. On, off.

My son wanted to be near me. Care-ful, I sang out the side of my mouth when he reached his hand for the box of pins: these could poke, I said, could hurt you. Care-ful, as he fingered the edge of the material already bordered with pins. Still, he drew closer. What are you doing, Mama? he asked, his elbows gnawing into my thighs as he climbed, his knees a second later—and in wreathing my arms around him to continue my work, the weight of him, his little butt lolling across my legs, the paradox of his body so angular and so plush all at once, warm against me in the rabid middle of March, I felt some cataract of magnanimity surge in me, some yawning open that happens with people we love, especially our children, a great being-taken-over by how good this all is, this loving, this parenting, even when it is also hard. He was hindering my progress, yes, but it filled me up to have him there, curious, cautious, near me. And so, my fingers folding and pressing, my heart roaring up inside me, I leaned over to kiss his head. I leaned in to kiss him with a mouthful of pins.

II

The thin wall separating the nasal cavity of my husband’s nose has been, since birth, pushed to one side. It’s not a cosmetic issue so much as one of reduced airflow. He’s so snorey! A year into our marriage, I buy earplugs and a white noise machine. Is this why I’m so tired all the time? A year later: I notice how tired he is all the time. Another year: after a sleep study, he’s diagnosed—voilá—with severe obstructive sleep apnea. In our fourth year of marriage, he has surgery to correct his deviated septum. Even with his corrected septum, my severely apneic husband experiences forty-plus breathing disruptions an hour. His body wakes itself because it wants to live. At night, a CPAP machine breathes humidly into the mask on his face. Under his T-shirt, he rubber-bands four softballs in place so he’ll sleep on his side. To the Darth Vader jokes, we add jokes about fatty back tissue, barnacles, more balls than we’ll ever need each night in bed.

III

On our faded green couch, I nurse my second son. His tiny hand rests against my chest, and I am in love with him, even as he starts to flail, that impulsive movement of the newly arrived, his overlong fingernails scratching across my neck and shoulder. I reach to enfold his hand in mine. Suddenly, a burning smell, something acrid, something plastic, something wrong, tinged with terrible heat. Gently, I pluck the nipple from my son’s mouth—he screams—and lay him down on a blanket—he screamxjiwjfs louder. I run into the kitchen but can’t make sense of what I’m seeing. A burner is on under an empty pot, must have been for hours. Who did that? The rubber sphere wedged into the handle of the pot’s top has melted into nothing, the water evaporated into a dark orange film around the sides. Was it me? Did I turn on the gas stove and put a pot of water on to boil? Why didn’t I use the kettle? In the living room, my small son shrieks and shrieks and coughs from shrieking and shrieks some more.

On, off. Off, off.

Liquids turn to gas. Flakes of Teflon curl up and rise. My children sleep upstairs. My children skitter around the kitchen. My children, my interim. My safekeeping, my household. If I hadn’t read the small slip of caution, would I know the coating of most nonstick pans will kill small birds kept in the kitchen?

I leave a pot of water to boil into itself. Poke my kid in the head with needles. Forget my words while teaching, while nattering on with friends, as if a colored wheel spins on my mind’s screen, searching whole seconds for a word like phrase. I sit dazed on the floor at nine in the morning, thinking, as though I were Winnie the Pooh: I was going to do something, I feel certain I was.

I can be a bit of a ditz, a flibbertigibbet. I’m a sleep-deprived mother of young children. Add in a cocktail of remorse and self-importance: You know it’s more than that. I know, because I was warned about having babies. I was warned about my marriage. I was warned about cocktails.

They didn’t say it in that exact way, of course—grave, leaning in their conspiratorial heads, starched coats white like a noon sky—but they might as well have. They, volley of doctors who led me in as circuitous a route as can be expected toward a diagnosis; a cadre of medical professionals who circle up in my mind, women and men alike lighting pipes, or jaunty little stubs of joints, sipping barrel-aged Scotch, nibbling at sashimi or gazpacho, their legs haphazardly crossed, tilting back in their chairs, chuckling, their cohort merging into a single entity having with me an after-hours tête-à-tête. You’re on, they say, miming the motion of an imaginary light switch at their temples, and then you’re off. It happens without warning, without cause—something they call a “sleep attack,” which is in fact a lack of GABA inhibitor, things happening or not happening, neuroreceptors not receiving, neurotransmitters not transmitting, deep in the recesses of the brain. Darlin’, they say, lifting gently a knuckle under my chin, be warned.

IV

Consider the descriptors of this disorder offered by experts in the field: excessive; major; idiopathic. As a field of medicine, Sleep is so young each diagnosis should have Sorry, Bruh tagged on the end. But I feel a strange gratitude for how troubling, how dramatic these words are: excessive, major, idiopathic. The height and width and breadth in them. Srsly, these adjectives say, gripping me by the shoulders, WTF?

V

The French found the drug able to keep me wakeful. It lurked inside an antihistamine. Michel Jouvet, a neurophysiologist and retired experimental-medicine professor, named it Modafinil, and even with my bad accent its sounds fall from me like a handful of bright blue flowers, like windows wrenched open over a blossoming. A eugeroic, the real gig. A trip. The haze burned off by stripes of sun and every inch of God’s green earth, alive. You-ja-ro-ic. My brain begins.

And ends, after three hours. I leave no glass slipper on the stairs. On, off.

VI

Last summer, my intrepid elder son, a ripe old two years and some change, obsessed with my computer after video conferencing with his grandparents several weekends in a row, sneaked into my office to poke at my computer. He crawled into the black antique Japanese chair, beveled in dull gold around the edges to match the desk with its scenes of geisha and Shinto temples. He tapped on the keyboard. He swiped at the touch pad to move the arrow around. He unplugged and replugged the power cord. His elbow knocked an open bottle off its coaster and slopped water across my computer. He watched it drip. Across the desk, onto the rug. He scooched down from the chair. And he ran.

An hour later when I made the discovery, the boy had already been read a book and put to bed. So the flurry of screeching and towels and hair dryers and flailing was more muffled than it might otherwise have been. We called Apple. We stuck the computer in huge vat of rice. I cried into my pillow.

Off, on.

Somehow my Mac survived, rising from the waters like Poseidon. Only now, a swath of the keyboard doesn’t work right; the 7, U, J, and M keys—and sometimes the colon/semicolon and quote marks—yield strange and fantastical things: current windows close, new windows appear, my privacy settings change, extra letters slide up unbidden, emails send midsentence, applications force-quit, the entire device powers down at 60 percent without warning. My computer misfires, namby-pambying into macOS nothing, and I am too cheap and stubborn to get a new one. I learn to type a neighbor letter to get the wacky ones in line and delete the extra letters without thinking muyqwch about the hassle.

Every once in a while, I am tempted to let them stay. If it takes me seven more minutes to answer an email, or twenty to retype what I lost when the machine went dead in a quick black flash, I have a yen to let it be known. This is what happens when I type the word suwieowepsn. That’s sun.

Sometimes it’s so odd and electrifying, I call my husband Josh from the other room. Look what happens when I write your name, I say. JÓÅ} Õœosh.

Golly, he says, if he says anything at all. Sometimes, like Kermit the Frog, he says, Sheesh.

The computer has a crush on you, I announce. What I mean is, Even my fucked-up shit digs youeqrtwy.

Lately, though, when I burst from my seat as the computer crashes, when I throw my hands around in mute fury, he swears too. He repeats, Can’t we please buy you a new computer?

VII

It’s past noon and we’ve played too long at Outside-Park. I carry my toddler home like one might a tiny drunk man, screaming, flailing, then slumped, boneless. Soon I’ve strapped my son into his seat over a woefully late lunch, his small voice straining even as he nods into his quesadilla that he’s not tired, does not need a nap. His eyelashes sweep against his cheeks, chin tipping toward his chest. He fights it like I fight it. He can let it win.

VIII

I harbor a monstrous jealoumxigwtxsy of napping, of nodding off.

IX

Try this one on the tongue: polytetrafluoroethylene. No misfiring there; all the letters are meant to be. PTFE, also known as Teflon, coats the pots and pans I use. Tucked in the tiny cubbies of my antique Japanese desk, stuck now between the Guggenheim business card of Edward Hirsch and a stack of carbon copy checks, is the warning slip I folded and kept from the big box containing our Calphalon pots and pans. I meant to write a poem about it. The birds in the kitchen, I mean. It almost seemed funny. In type as light as fog, you’re cautioned that your birds could die, how they will, if you are not careful. Do not overheat. Ventilate, ventilate. Let your birds breathe. This is the recommendation.

X

The nap is the lure, the prize, the dream she dreams in her waking hours. The nap is a lie. Sleep attacks, and in the sick twist of all this, she wants sleep like she wants her lover. But sleep is a trick. The hypersomnxvwzniac’s brain only wants more of it; the brain is a fool for sleep. The brain fools, tells her she must have what will not be gotten. Sleep is not rest.

XI

Like all of us, Marc Grégoire wanted fewer tangles in this life. To be exact, on his fishing gear, the hooks and shiny feathered fake bait, the light line grappling all night long in the box, as in a bad dream, snarled, taut. And what, after all, is a fishing French engineer to do but try out Teflon on his gear? Wifey Colette caught wind, wanted the substance to coat her cooking pans. And so France granted Grégoire a patent in 1954, and two years later the company Tefal started manufacturing nonstick cookware. DuPont must have kicked themselves. They’d been sitting on Teflon since World War II, when it was a military secret, used as a parts sealant against gases in the atomic bomb. They’d attempted a few commercial ventures for bread and cookie-making. They were too worried about toxins.

XII

I tear off the shiny green paper and sit, stunned. My in-laws, tipped off by my husband, have bought me a new computer. They think I’m crying with gratitude, which I am. But also, I like my dumb old misfiring computer. I love it. It’s like me.

I do love me. Don’t I?

XIII

A diagnosis can do that, take what you believe about yourself and unhook it from the core of your knowing, like life jackets stored in the bow of a skiff, each self-certainty tossed roughly, to no one, out into the wide body of the water.

This is my only boat, my lover fingering the rope of the mast, my children playing in the skein. But will I, after all, burn down the house? Injure them with the mouth that leans in for a kiss?

Who will know how hard I’m trying? On, off. Off, off. Off, on.

They will try. They will want to understand. I want to.

You will, someone whispers, and it could be the ghost of Yoda or the wind passing through our elbows. The heart swearing itself off despair forever. Even if, after all, you cannot. Youslkfajslk will.

Read more from Issue 19.2.