1
My roommate never worked. He was the inheritor to a grand fortune. Cattle futures, etcetera. So, when he didn’t wake up, it wasn’t unusual, but given his latest mindfulness program, fifteen minutes of morning sun on the balcony, naked, followed by a cold shower, naked, with the planned addition of a dip in the three-thousand-dollar sensory deprivation tank coming from Taiwan, naked, I felt the obligation to check on him.
I was up. No surprise there. I had been since one-forty-three-a-m, now it was twenty-one-to eleven. I’d been watching lecture recordings from years ago. My third-year economics professor, now deceased, was reaching the end of his slides, and mentioned it was time for lunch, which meant it was time for my breakfast. Or dinner? I’d smeared some hummus on a few crackers at fifteen-past-two and finished the remains of last night’s pad Thai at five-or-so. I couldn’t decide on the meal designation, so settled for a neutral banana which tasted like hair.
I knew Sig wasn’t up, because the sink was clear of wet coffee grounds and vegemite crumbs. I knew because the glass door of the shower was free of fog, because the TV wasn’t lazily playing, asking if anyone was still watching.
2
I knocked once. I peered inside. A slice of blanket cutting his torso on the diagonal, half a defined chest. A wet halo on his pillow, floating above dry lips. Elongated snores and quick grunts. I sat on top of his gingham quilt–a gift from a girl he’d not spoken to in months–and gave him a light shake. No response. Once more, nothing. I didn’t push further; these were signs of a big night. Funny that I hadn’t heard him leave or come home, even though I was wide awake. Funny too because we hadn’t been out in months.
There were wet sounds outside, I lapped them up. It had been barren and dry since November. A grey mist was spreading across the window, from the edges, like a fungus. The clouds were steeping in the sky like fat, bulging teabags, dripping on a mass of umbrellas below.
On the Threshold of a Dream / 2
The umbrellas were an odd shape, I thought, but everything looks odd from thirteen stories up without glasses on. They were oblong, with long bits sticking out at odd angles, and the rain didn’t roll off, it soaked in.
The skin-coloured, face-shaped blots were the giveaway. I ran from the window, sifted through a cupboard of barely used hiking gear. Binoculars lifted to my eyes; a bicycle lay in the centre of my honed vision. It was flipped, the chain caught around the leg of a delivery driver whose body was curved inwards. His cubic backpack was strewn open, spilled milk and cracked eggs on the concrete.
3
The first time I stayed up, I wandered out back, looking for Dad’s flashlight. It was in the shed, where he’d fiddle with his bike before work, as the sun slept through alarms. I called it The Fridge; in winter I imagined stalactites hanging from its darkened ceiling. It was black outside, and my long peejays were curled underneath my heels, getting soiled by last night’s rain. I grasped for familiar objects, praying I’d avoid the vat of compost, trusting that the stench of rotten fruit would warn me. My fingertips touched the stem of the hills hoist. I slid them up and kept my arms raised to its branches, following one to its outer edge. Hand outstretched… A-ha! I gripped the metal handle. A taste of blood, a smear of brown rust. I peeled the Fridge door open, slipped inside, stopped cold. Suddenly, I felt afraid and very stupid, horrified at my vulnerability in that cramped space with scattered nails and saws resting on toolboxes, bike spokes hanging from the ceiling. Frozen in a cicada shell, I moulted prematurely, dashing through the strip of moonlight and into the yard and screamed, my bare feet landing on knives which crackled like shattered glass. My parents came outside and turned on the backyard light, and I gulped at my yellow feet and the bits of eggshell scattered on the grass around my toes.
4
The elevator looked like the aftermath of an orgy, knocked-out postcoital bodies, five minutes after climax, limbs still intertwined. They looked peaceful. I took the stairs, all thirteen flights. I tripped, four flights from the bottom floor. A hand was jutting out of the fire escape, between
the door and its jamb. I fell, I bled. I groped for my front teeth, searching for chips, like I had to look good for the snoozing plaza I was walking into.
I stepped over a bunch of bruised tomatoes and ignored the cracked skull of their purchaser. I walked off the human-friendly pavement and onto the domain of cars, which were unusually quiet, their drivers asleep or dead. I’d long blamed noisy cars for my condition. Even during
my years in country towns after graduation, I heard their whirring from the distant highway. I despised them, not least because I wasn’t allowed to drive them.
On the Threshold of a Dream / 3
The crashes had all reached their conclusions; those lazy enough to put up their handbrake and rest their foot had received the brunt from those who hadn’t. I didn’t call anyone. The facts of the scenario seemed so evident. I knew that no one would answer, that no one in the world was awake but me.
5
I adored sleep, from the moment I first woke and realised where I’d been. It was 1995, I imagine around three-fifteen-p-m. I was breaking loose of a potent nap. White caked my vision, of course. That’s all there is when you’re a baby, white nappies, white sheets, white clouds on blue wallpaper, white milk dribbling down your chin, your weak jaw unable to stay closed. Inevitably, your shit dirties all that clean linen. Consequence is learned by bowel movements, before your parents and teachers beat it into you.
Coming out of that nap, I noticed my dreams had been in colour, that the white world I was waking to was different from where I’d been. I slept so much after that. I’d nod off in class, I turned every after-school hangout into a sleepover. By high school, I’d slept so much I was tired of it.
6
I clutched a head of hair, shifting its forehead off a pressed horn. Still in my fuzzy brown bathrobe, I sauntered down Regent Street, admiring the crunched steel and aluminium. A light rain still fell, and miniature rainbows bounded across the shattered windshields. I tap-tapped on car doors as I passed.
Close to the station, I felt queasy. The sleeping were unpredictable. Who knew when they might wake, snore, speak, fidget, roll over, walk? I closed my eyes and let the metal cool the back of my neck, wishing for a wave of heart attacks.
7
Meeting Sig had given me hope. He was bursting with strategies, routines, methods. He bought me an orthopaedic mattress. He made me journal by hand, and by candlelight. I locked my phone in a box at night, saying goodbye to blue-light-eyes. I read all the dull writing I could find; Richard II and articles from the Australian—in print—as well as all the top ten lists my aunt had ever sent, warning me of infertility and autism if I were to ever take modern medicine. My eyelids didn’t droop. Sig hooked me up with the best doctors, I filled all the prescriptions and adhered to my pill-popping schedule. I smoked weed, then took sublingual CBD, then went sober, even from coffee and chocolate. I stripped my life of joy, and for what? So, I
On the Threshold of a Dream / 4
stopped trying, and resigned myself to a life awake. Besides, Sig was already onto the next thing.
8
I got bored of looking at sleeping people. I went home and put on old boxsets of dystopian TV instead. I figured that the power would go off soon enough, and maybe I’d find some valuable survival tips beforehand, but all those shows did was make me feel lonely. There were no other survivors for me to band together with, no one with whom I could bond or betray or coparent a child in the apocalypse. It was fourteen seasons, a total of one hundred and eighty-two episodes later. In the silence of loading episodes, I heard growling stomachs. I’d grown used to the soundtrack of gentle breathing and precipitation. Now it was punctuated with gasps and chortles. On the occasional walk to the shops, I saw the sleeping grow more and more emaciated. I hadn’t opened my roommate’s door in weeks. I kept a scented candle burning.
9
I hadn’t thought about moving. I saw a job listing for an assistant at a sleep research clinic and took the eight-forty-three morning train up. I was surprised to find a sprawling residential apartment complex at the provided address, but I buzzed up anyway. Sig answered excitedly. He wasn’t shaving at the time, and he would’ve looked threatening with that patchy beard and those thick tattooed arms, if not for the gentle green eyes resting above.
‘It’s no different from a normal 9-5,’ he told me. ‘I sleep for eight hours, you monitor me, record whatever you find. I want you to track me just like a smartwatch does, without giving my data to fascists. The rest of the time, the apartment is yours. I keep the fridge well-stocked; I’ve got all the conveniences you’ll want. It’ll be like working for big tech except no water cooler bullshit and no genocides on your conscience.’
It wasn’t quite what I had hoped to get from the job, but I took it. The experiment went for a few weeks, with inconclusive results, though we decided sleeping on his side with a firmer pillow was best. The job was over, but he never asked me to move out.
10
I only went out when necessary. The stench was unbearable. I kept my eyes up. If I wavered or tripped, I’d see horrible things. Dogs, who had waited for their owners to wake up for weeks, were losing their patience. I lost my appetite.
I felt like smashing in the shop windows, splintering my knuckles on the glass, finding an air raid siren, letting it rip. I wanted to climb to the bell tower of every church and ring until my
On the Threshold of a Dream / 5
muscles ached, then scream from the parapets. I might have done all those things, I think I did, I can’t be sure. It didn’t make a difference, so it doesn’t matter. I longed to hear a groan, a voice asking for five more minutes.
11
After the sleep clinic, and Sig’s attempts to fix me, I started tagging along with him on nights out. We’d go for drinks in the CBD, meet a half dozen friends whom I’d see once and never again. I became the only constant in his rolodex of nocturnal hangouts. I just wanted something to do, he wanted someone to do things with.
12
I climbed the thirteen flights, weary, and slumped on the faded leather couch, throwing off my raincoat. I pressed the remote and the television ignored me. I poured cold water from the kettle into a teacup. I flicked light switches in the dark, I stared at the black rectangle of my phone. I stared at Sig’s permanently closed bedroom door, airlocked with taped sandbags.
I squinted in the moonlit living room. I sank lower into the plush cushions. I squirmed, felt the bike spokes poking and prodding me, making cuts in my pyjamas. I waved at my old friend. He held out his arms. I felt his hot, soothing breath, the skin of his arms grazing my bare back. A firework blew in the pitch black behind my closing eyelids. We talked for ages; he filled me in on what I’d missed.
