Thieves Are Kept

Chapter One: Twelve Years Thin

I have not slept properly since I was fourteen years old.

People hear that and think they understand. They think of the bad week they had before their wedding, or the year the baby was small, or that stretch after a funeral when the ceiling became interesting. They say things like, God, I'd die, and then they go home and lie down and the lights go out behind their eyes as easily as a hand closing a drawer.

What I have is not that. What I have is a body that will not switch off.

Here is the arithmetic of my life. I sleep in scraps. Ninety minutes at two in the morning if the wind is right. Forty minutes at dawn, the kind of shallow dip that feels less like rest and more like a held breath. On a good night, two hours, broken into three pieces. Twelve years of that. If you do the sums the way I have done them at four in the morning with a calculator app and a mouth that tastes like pennies, you find that I am owed something on the order of thirty thousand hours.

I think about that number the way other people think about debt. It sits.

The doctors were kind for the first three years and tired of me after that. I have had my blood taken so many times that the inside of my left elbow has a permanent grey bruise like a thumbprint on fruit. I have had a camera down my throat and a light in my ear and electrodes glued to my scalp with paste that smells like wet chalk. Everything came back normal. My thyroid is fine. My iron is fine. My heart, they told me with something close to resentment, is the heart of an athlete.

The word they finally settled on was idiopathic. It sounds like a diagnosis. It means: it is happening and we do not know why.

I learned to build a life around the hole. I took a job doing overnight captioning for a company that services news channels and courtroom feeds, which means that from ten at night until six in the morning I sit in the dark and turn other people's voices into text. I have transcribed traffic fatalities, weather warnings, four murders, a man in Ohio explaining to a jury why he set his own barn alight. The work suits me. The world at three in the morning is a thin, honest place. Everyone still awake in it is awake for a reason.

At six I close the laptop and lie down, and I do not sleep, and at eight I get up and eat something and take the dog I do not have for the walk I do not take, and the day goes past me like scenery seen from a train.

This is what nobody tells you about not sleeping. It is not dramatic. You do not fall over. You simply thin out. Your sense of humour goes first, then your patience, then your sense of yourself as a person with a future. You start to feel like a photograph of someone rather than the someone. You forget words for things you have used every day of your life — colander, thumbtack, cousin. You cry at the wrong times and cannot cry at the right ones. Light gets loud. Sound gets bright. And there is a pressure that builds behind your sternum, a low, constant ache like a bruise on the inside of the breastbone, and if you press there with your fingers you can almost convince yourself you feel it flinch.

And sometimes, out at the edge of the room, something stands very still.

I want to be careful here, because this is the part where people stop listening. I never saw anything. Not then. Not for twelve years. What I had was the sense of occupancy — the feeling you get walking into your own kitchen and knowing, before you look, that somebody is in it. A corner of a room would take on weight. The air in the hallway would go grainy and thick, the way water goes when someone has stirred silt up off the bottom. I would look, and there would be a coat rack, a doorframe, my own jacket on a hook. Nothing. Just the reliable furniture of a small rented life.

I told a doctor about it once, in year four, when I still believed in telling doctors things. He wrote hypnagogic hallucinations on his pad in handwriting I could read upside down, and then he asked me, very gently, whether I ever thought about hurting myself.

I said no. That was true. I have never wanted to die. I have only ever wanted to lie down and have the lights go out behind my eyes like a hand closing a drawer.

My father wanted the same thing. He did not get it either.

Frederick Hatch was a decent man with a bad back and a laugh you could hear from the driveway. He ran the parts counter at a garage on the county road outside Ludlow Falls, which is where I grew up, which is a mill town in western Maine with no mill in it anymore, just the long brick shell of one down by the river with birch trees coming up through the loading dock. He liked bad television and good bread. He could not remember the name of a single one of my teachers and he came to every single parents' evening anyway, standing in the corridor with his hands in his pockets, agreeing enthusiastically with everything anyone said about me.

He stopped sleeping when I was fourteen. So did I.

We never talked about it as a shared thing. That was not how our house worked. But I would come downstairs at three in the morning for water and the kitchen light would already be on, and he would be sitting at the table with the radio turned down to a murmur, and he'd say, Can't settle, huh, and I'd say, Can't settle, and we'd sit there together not settling. Sometimes he made toast. Sometimes we just sat. There was a companionship in it that I have never found again with anyone, and I would give a great deal to have one more hour of it, and I have thought since that those hours were the two of us being eaten side by side at the same table.

He lasted fourteen months.

He went down fast at the end. He had always been a big man, six foot two, thick through the chest, and by that final winter his wedding ring turned freely on his finger and his belt was on a hole I had punched into the leather myself with a nail because we could not find one small enough. His skin went papery. His hair thinned in patches, not like illness — like something drying. He drank water constantly, gallons of it, and it did nothing.

And he got calm. That is the part I still cannot make peace with. In the last two weeks he stopped being frightened, and started being polite.

One night — the second week of February, sleet on the windows — I came down and found him in his armchair in the front room with the lamp off and all the doors open. He was looking at the corner of the room, over by the bookcase, with his head slightly tilted. He looked interested. He looked like a man watching a bird on a feeder.

I said, Dad.

He said, without turning, Eight tonight.

I said, Eight what.

And he thought about it for a while, and he said, You know, honey, I'd rather not say. I don't want you to start counting.

Then he asked if I wanted toast.

He died five nights later. My mother found him at six in the morning in the same chair, upright, hands on the arms of it, eyes open. His eyes had dried out. That was the detail I overheard through the wall while the paramedics talked to the doctor, and it is the detail that comes back to me at four in the morning, twelve years later, still bright, still fresh, like something kept in liquid.

He weighed eighty-one pounds.

A man who had weighed two hundred and ten in June. Nobody could explain it. Nothing had been taken out of him that anyone could point to; he was intact, whole, unmarked, a complete man in every particular except that there was almost nothing inside the shape of him. Dry as a wasp's nest, said one of the men, not knowing I was on the stairs.

And his mouth was full of silt.

Fine grey powder, so fine it moved like liquid. Packed into his mouth, banked up against his teeth, filling his throat all the way down. They took a sample. They sent it away. It came back as mineral dust — silica, some carbonates, nothing organic, nothing that belonged in a human airway and nothing that matched the soil of our yard or the dust of our house or anything within thirty miles.

The coroner's office in Ludlow Falls was one man, and the one man was seventy-four and eight months from retirement. He wrote dust asphyxia, secondary to profound cachexia of unknown origin, and he signed it, and he closed the file, and when my mother called four times to ask how a man alone in a locked house comes to have his throat filled with a mineral that isn't in the house, the office stopped taking her calls.

My mother lasted four more years. Cancer, ordinary and cruel and at least explicable. My sister Katie was twelve when Dad died and sixteen when Mom did, and I was nineteen and twenty-three, and I raised her badly with the raw materials available to me, which were night shifts, canned soup, and an unshakeable conviction that our family had been marked in some way we had not been told about.

Katie sleeps like a stone. I want that on the record early, because it matters later. My sister has always been able to fall asleep in a moving car, on a hard floor, at a party, mid-sentence. She used to do it at the kitchen table when she was small, face-down beside her plate, and Dad would carry her up with her arms hanging and her mouth open, and he'd say, out like a light, out like a light.

I used to watch her sleep, when we were living in that empty house together with the insurance money running out. I would stand in her doorway at four in the morning and watch my sister breathe, and I would feel a thing in my chest that I did not have a name for and did not want to look at directly. I told myself it was love. It was, partly. It was love, and it was something standing right next to love with its face turned away.

I know what it was now.

But I am getting ahead of the story, and the story properly starts at my father's wake, with a woman I did not know signing the book.