Fiction / Arthur Abramov

 

:: Insomnolent Ruminations ::

 

7:21.

He can­not feel his left arm. The shoul­der aches. Both pits are sweaty, as is the nape of his neck and his low­er back. The fab­ric beneath him has soaked through. The top sheet and bed­spread, he thinks, must weigh 80 lbs. The black­out cur­tains are drawn. The fan is buzzing, click­ing arrhyth­mi­cal­ly, and he can’t shut the damn thing off.

 

7:22.

He is parched. Pro­found­ly parched. His first cup of cof­fee should’ve been forty-sev­en min­utes ago. The sug­ges­tion of a headache has pre­sent­ed itself, and it can­not be ignored. But the cof­fee pods he found in the room two nights ago are gone now, and only the cof­fee-mak­ing con­trap­tion remains, use­less with­out its caf­feinat­ed cups. And all the while it’s rain­ing, and he’s trapped in this sun­less, stuffy, sin­gle-win­dowed shithole.

 

7:23.

He wish­es he had his book­light. He wish­es this room had a bal­cony. He wish­es she’d wake up. And for the love of God, he wish­es she’d get off of him. Her leg—wrapped around his low­er torso—is 125° Fahren­heit. Her sweaty arms like octo­pus ten­ta­cles, envelop­ing him, and he, the poor, help­less sea crea­ture, can find no escape. Her face, pressed into his, is much too close. Her mouth-breath exhales nois­i­ly, sog­gi­ly into his beard, already damp with sweat. Her mess of hair tick­les his ears, catch­es on his eye­lash­es, some­how finds its way up his nose. He thinks to turn his cheek away but knows that in the end she will find him.

 

7:25.

His arm, pinned beneath her slum­ber­ing shape, has fall­en asleep. She has trapped him.

 

7:27.

The mouth-breath­ing con­tin­ues. Is it get­ting louder?

 

7:28.

Unsuc­cess­ful attempt at rolling onto his side. Dead arm still impris­oned. Her ten­ta­cles wrap even tighter around him. There is no escape.

 

7:30.

He was a free man once. A bed to call his own. A cof­feemak­er that brewed him a pot every morn­ing at 6:35. A white noise machine. A room with more than one win­dow. Sheets that weren’t damp with perspiration.

 

7:31.

What is exis­tence, that so many wak­ing hours are spent doing nothing—waiting, star­ing off into space, day­dream­ing? How many hours has he wast­ed? How many min­utes? Sec­onds? And how many more does he have left to waste—until oblivion?

60 sec­onds in a minute.

60 min­utes in an hour.

3600 sec­onds.

3600 sec­onds in an hour.

24 hours in a day.

 

7:33.

86,400 sec­onds in a day.

365 days in a year.

 

7:35.

31,536,000 sec­onds in a year.

But how many more years can a man like him expect to last? Thir­ty-five, he’ll say.

31,536,000 sec­onds times 35 years.

 

7:44.

1,103,760,000 more seconds-ish.

One bil­lion, one hun­dred and three mil­lion, sev­en hun­dred and six­ty thou­sand sec­onds remain­ing. Bil­lion. A num­ber too high to count to. An incom­pre­hen­si­bly big num­ber. He can find com­fort in that bil­lion. What would a bil­lion of any­thing look like? He can­not imag­ine. Even a million…

 

7:46.

But even a bil­lion is finite. It cannot—it will not—go on for­ev­er. He envi­sions some­where an enor­mous count­down clock for his life. Tick­ing away the years, weeks, days, min­utes, the mil­lions and mil­lions of seconds.

 

7:47.

How many of those bil­lion sec­onds aren’t even wak­ing sec­onds? Eight hours of sleep a day, times sev­en… On sec­ond thought, he’d rather live in the mystery.

 

7:49.

Left leg now ful­ly numb beneath the weight of her two stur­dy legs. And what if his sleep­ing leg nev­er woke up again? Has such a thing ever occurred to any­one ever, in all the world? He choos­es to believe that it has at least once.

 

7:50.

…In Latvia. Riga. A home­less man, sleep­ing on a bench beneath a tree on a snowy win­ter evening in Baste­jkalns Park, beside the stat­ue of Rūdolfs Blaumanis—the one where he is seat­ed with his legs crossed, look­ing sto­ic, mus­ta­chioed, strong-browed. And the snow is com­ing down, he thinks, and the man is wrapped in his frozen blan­ket, his arms hugged so tight around his pale, shiv­er­ing body. And what a ter­ri­ble dis­cov­ery he’s made when he wakes in the morn­ing. His limbs encased in an icy fab­ric cocoon, one in which—unbeknownst to him—his arms have become par­a­lyzed, have fall­en asleep for­ev­er. Are they frost­bit­ten? Was the man’s cir­cu­la­tion cut off for too long? How should he know? This scene is only a hypo­thet­i­cal after all.

 

7:52.

How many sec­onds might be in a hun­dred years? Maybe 3,000,000,000 or so? Then the Green­land Shark could live 10,000,000,000 to 15,000,000,000 sec­onds. And why should this animal—a giant fish, no less—be reward­ed with such a glut of time? Sure­ly the mind of a Green­land Shark can­not be that sophisticated—not enough to appre­ci­ate the gen­er­ous bio­log­i­cal gift it has been granted.

 

7:59.

Does she set her week­end alarm for eight?

8:00.

No.

 

8:01.

But maybe he was some­one before that fate­ful night when he made his bed on that bench, when snow cov­ered the park in a blan­ket of white and his limbs fell asleep, this cold man in the park. Before he lay down for the last time, unaware that he’d wake to hands for­ev­er frozen, feet gone lame, and fin­gers that could no longer hold a pen.

 

8:02.

Before, when his face was rec­og­niz­able, his beard cut short, kept tidy, when no more than a dozen of its hairs were gray. When his books were sold in Europe’s finest bookshops.

 

8:03.

The press tours that ran from Prague to Krakow to Berlin, all the way to Vil­nius. But always there was time to return to Riga, to vis­it his school friends, to give a free talk at the Nation­al Library of Latvia, to vis­it his father’s grave. How dread­ful­ly young 52 was for a man to die, he would think.

 

8:04.

How many sec­onds in 52 years? It hurts his brain even think­ing about it.

 

8:05.

But the frozen man in Baste­jkalns Park. Even at the height of his suc­cess, his bril­liance nev­er came close to match­ing that of Rūdolfs Blau­ma­n­is, cel­e­brat­ed mas­ter of Lat­vian realism.

 

8:06.

He wish­es the cup at the edge of the night­stand was just two inch­es clos­er. The fan makes the air too dry—though not, to his dis­may, any cool­er. This dark, stuffy room—with its unopened windows—is too much to endure. And were it not for this woman beside him—or more accu­rate­ly, on top of him—he would rise to his sog­gy, swollen feet, throw back the heavy cur­tains, and let in the fresh morn­ing air.

 

8:07.

He can­not do this, of course. Not until she wakes of her own accord. Awak­ens and frees him from his internment.

 

8:08.

Maybe he is like the oth­er man. This bed: his bench. His lover: the cold, frozen blan­ket that encased the sleep­ing Lat­vian writer, pre­vent­ing him from get­ting up from his makeshift bed. And what if things were reversed and he is a cre­ation of the sleep­ing man’s mind?

 

8:09.

Per­haps a char­ac­ter from one of the author’s many nov­els? Imag­ine all those read­ers con­jur­ing up dif­fer­ent visions of him in their minds as they read his sto­ry in nov­el form. And not just in Latvian—no! For this author had at one time been quite famous. His books were read in Pol­ish and Russ­ian and Ger­man and French and Swedish and Dan­ish and Roman­ian. Think of all the dif­fer­ent ways they might imag­ine him.

 

8:10.

How would he look in the mind of a Dutch per­son, or a read­er in Slove­nia? What about Italy? He pic­tures a sea of inter­na­tion­al doppelgängers—men who look and feel sus­pi­cious­ly sim­i­lar to him but all some­what off from the original.

 

8:11.

He won­ders what the man’s most famous nov­el might have been about. Maybe the sto­ry of a hap­less fel­low, one who stum­bles from one adven­ture to anoth­er. Yes, he can pic­ture it…

 

8:12.

The pipes were paint­ed a sick­ly pea green, though you could be for­giv­en for not hav­ing noticed, caked as they were with so much rust, filth, and grime that they looked like arti­facts new­ly exca­vat­ed from out of the mud. They hung at head height, and they ran through­out the whole of the gloomy, musty-aired base­ment. That they had not yet burst or cor­rod­ed to the point of dis­in­te­gra­tion was a small mir­a­cle, filled, as they were, with that sticky orange water that had turned to poi­son in the decades it had spent inside those met­al tubes.

But Anatol…no…

…Vil­nus!

Vil­nus dared not…

No, that wasn’t right either, but closer…

 

8:13.

Vil­nius? No, that’s a city.

Oļegs.

Gunārs?

No…

Val­dus…

Val­dus? Uldas?

Uld­is, yes! That’s it.

 

8:14.

Uld­is dared not lay a fin­ger on any of the pipes, lest they choose that moment to come apart, flood­ing their cramped, secret home under the old shoe fac­to­ry. For Father would be furi­ous. Furi­ouser than he already tend­ed to be in the first place, Uld­is thought. Why was Father furi­ous? They had a place to live, many pic­tures on the wall, and a vast col­lec­tion of inter­est­ing toys and cut­lery, not to men­tion Father’s enor­mous­ly impres­sive library of books, which Uld­is could not read. But luck­i­ly, Father could read them aloud to his son, who loved hear­ing the odd words and oft-incom­pre­hen­si­ble turns of phrase con­tained in such var­ied works as Reimetoff’s Con­clu­sion, The Machine Eter­nal: Tran­sub­stan­ti­at­ed Tech­nolo­gies Vol. I & II, and Antipo­dal­i­ties.

 

8:15.

Father under­stood the books. Yet, as he remind­ed Uld­is time and again, the ideas them­selves were too com­plex to be ful­ly under­stood by his une­d­u­cat­ed son.

 

“But know that they are impor­tant, boy, and that with­in the pages of these books is enough knowl­edge for one man to study many life­times over.”

 

What a pity that Uld­is should enter his father’s librar­i­um one evening to dis­cov­er the old man unex­pect­ed­ly expired, seat­ed in his favorite arm­chair, his bulging eyes star­ing off into noth­ing­ness, his stiff fin­gers still clutch­ing his beloved copy of Equi­s­ti­cisms: The Mad­den­ing Art.

 

8:16.

He could not recall ever see­ing a per­son be dead before. This was what it looked like? Frozen in place, qui­et. How unlike Father to be so qui­et. Uld­is thought he looked rather com­i­cal. He won­dered when Father would return to the way he’d been before. There was hard­ly a time when he wasn’t talk­ing or read­ing aloud to Uld­is or—just as often—reading to him­self. He did love the sound of Father’s read­ing voice, and he knew that Father loved hear­ing him­self. If he wasn’t read­ing aloud or talk­ing at his son, Father was invari­ably singing some unusu­al melody of his own devis­ing. The sound of Father had filled the house always. Until today.

 

8:17.

Now the house was emp­ty, or it felt empty—this base­ment they called a house. But with­out the sound­track of Father’s voice, their home felt strange­ly unfa­mil­iar, alien. Uld­is did not like this change. He hoped that things would return to nor­mal the fol­low­ing day. But they did not. Nor did they the next day or the day after that.

 

8:18.

What hap­pens to Uld­is next, now that Father is dead and the place is eeri­ly quiet?

 

She mum­bles some­thing indis­cernible. She’s prone to talk­ing in her sleep.

 

8:19.

After a week—or maybe a month—he has real­ized that Father will not return to the way he was before. And there was the odor that came from Father as he grad­u­al­ly decayed in the librar­i­um. Uld­is had tried to keep the insects and the worms at bay, but every morn­ing, no mat­ter how many he’d shooed away the night before, they came back. And Father’s face and hands began to look much less Father-like, until, one morn­ing, Uld­is thought he no longer rec­og­nized Father.

 

8:20.

Father unfa­mil­iar, bugs and worms—and even lit­tle rodents—invading the librar­i­um. The unbear­able stench that made Uldis’s eyes water and turned his stom­ach sour. It was enough to pro­pel the man to climb up the long, dark stair­case and leave his and Father’s base­ment bach­e­lor pad for the first time.

 

8:21.

To stand at the big met­al door that Father told him nev­er to open. And on the oth­er side, what was there? Nev­er before had he any rea­son to ascend the stairs, to open the door.

 

8:22.

And where does he go? On adventures—or, bet­ter yet, on a series of mis­ad­ven­tures. Uld­is would emerge from the under­ground bunker and find him­self in a dilap­i­dat­ed fac­to­ry, filled with ancient, erod­ed machin­ery the likes of which he’d nev­er seen before. And old signs and wrin­kled, fad­ed papers lit­ter­ing the ground, con­tain­ing bizarre sym­bols that to him looked like noth­ing more than gib­ber­ish. For they were not like the symbols—letters, Father called them—that were con­tained with­in those books in the librarium.

 

8:23.

And he would wan­der through every room of the sprawl­ing, mul­ti-build­ing fac­to­ry, inspect­ing each sign and book, peer­ing inside every clos­et, open­ing all the stor­age com­part­ments and lock­ers, run­ning his hands across the sur­face of the impres­sive ancient machin­ery. But he would under­stand nothing.

 

8:24.

And after spend­ing one day or two explor­ing all cor­ners of the fac­to­ry, he would grow bored, and his curios­i­ty would undoubt­ed­ly com­pel him to stray past the front gate of the old shoe factory—out into the snowy white mead­ow beyond. Snow—a thing that Father had tried to describe to his son many times over, but that Uld­is could nev­er quite envi­sion. Yet now he would touch the icy pow­der and feel it melt in his hands, and he would see that Father wasn’t mak­ing up sto­ries pure­ly for his amuse­ment, but that he was telling Uld­is the truth. For the first time, he would feel the chill of the win­ter wind, know what it was to feel cold, a thing he did not know was pos­si­ble until now. And he would wan­der direc­tion­less for hours.

 

8:25.

Oh, to be cold like Uld­is. What he wouldn’t give to be sleep­ing some­where cold, instead of in this dark, cramped, suf­fo­cat­ing lit­tle hotel room in the mid­dle of this mediocre, mid-sized metrop­o­lis. God, it was sweltering.

 

8:26.

The boy roamed the wide mead­ow, cov­ered in a fresh blan­ket of snow, until he could no longer see the dark gray fac­to­ry build­ings behind him. Nor could he recall from which direc­tion he had come. He would wish that Father was with him, could see the enor­mous field of white that seemed to run on for­ev­er. But Uld­is would not return to the fac­to­ry or the base­ment or to Father’s librar­i­um again.

 

8:27.

After a time, he would come upon a vil­lage, with hous­es built into the cliff­side. And in his joy and won­der­ment, he would race to the first per­son he saw, who hap­pened to be an old, shriv­eled-look­ing man rest­ing on a crate. Uld­is would tell him about the snow he had seen in the mead­ow. He would talk and talk, describ­ing every detail. At the end of his expla­na­tion, he would invite the man to come and see the snow for himself—even though Uld­is was not cer­tain he remem­bered the way back. But the old, hunched fel­low gave no reply. He just sat on his crate as he had the whole time, see­ing as he was deaf. Yet even if he could hear Uldis’s words, he wouldn’t have under­stood them, spo­ken in a tongue that was not his own.

 

8:28.

Yes, he thinks. Even though the boy has escaped the tiny world that held him cap­tive for so long, still he is con­fined, cut off—no, iso­lat­ed! Iso­lat­ed from the rest of humanity.

 

What a bleak nov­el the author has written—or, would have writ­ten, this imag­i­nary author who found him­self cold and shiv­er­ing on that snow-cov­ered bench in Baste­jkalns Park in Riga, Latvia—a place so far away as to seem unre­al, imag­ined, almost myth­i­cal. And one in a long line of places that he will like­ly nev­er visit.

 

8:29.

Will he ever make it to Moscow? Not that he par­tic­u­lar­ly wants to go there. But those stun­ning cathedrals—maybe he would like to see them one day. He’s nev­er had any great desire to go there, but maybe the fact that it is off lim­its now makes it more of an appeal­ing des­ti­na­tion. What is it like over there? What are the peo­ple like? How does it smell? What of the Trans-Siber­ian Rail­way, the longest rail­road in all the world, that goes all the way to Siberia? Siberia—that place where they are always dig­ging up fifty-thou­sand-year-old mam­moth carcasses.

 

8:30.

He’s nev­er seen a mam­moth fos­sil, not in real life. Just pic­tures. How does he know they’re even real mam­moth fos­sils? Maybe they’re noth­ing more than a hoax, con­jured up by a bunch of bored sci­en­tists sta­tioned out there at the end of the world. Prac­ti­cal­ly the North Pole, he thinks. How should he know?

 

8:31.

Her snor­ing unceas­ing. He has to uri­nate, but now more of her is draped over him.

 

8:32.

He should call his old­er sis­ter soon. Per­haps tomor­row. It has been a month or two or three. He sup­pos­es she’ll say things are the same, as they always are. That’s the prob­lem with their calls: nev­er able to break free from dis­cussing the same top­ics, ask­ing the same ques­tions, reit­er­at­ing the same opin­ions, and repeat­ing the same turns of phrase they’ve exchanged with one anoth­er for the past two decades. There are days when he despairs that noth­ing new seems to hap­pen anymore—to him or any­one he knows.

 

8:33.

The noth­ing-new-ness of it all. Has he real­ly reached that point of life already? Bare­ly a gray hair on his head, and he’s seen it all, expe­ri­enced every­thing? On days like this one, when he’s bare­ly slept and the air is stale and the skies that ter­ri­ble, over­cast shade of gray­ish-white, but even when the skies are clear, are sun­ny and bright for too many days in a row, that feel­ing, that sense of melan­choly, of utter hope­less­ness creeps back in. Does she get that same feel­ing, he won­ders. Is she over­whelmed with par­a­lyz­ing dread? If so, she’s nev­er told him. No, her mind is untrou­bled by such things.

 

8:34.
Free from the self-pity, the nihilism, the morose dis­po­si­tion that has felt like an inte­gral part of his being for as long as he can remem­ber. Buoy­ant, he some­times called her, though he knew she resents it, as if imply­ing that she is shal­low, not an intro­spec­tive per­son, or maybe a less sub­stan­tive one—though he has been care­ful nev­er to sug­gest as much.

 

8:35.

But he could’ve been a lot of things. He was a lot of things, and he will be more things in the future. But he longs to be some­thing great—or, bet­ter yet, some­one great. A philoso­pher or com­pos­er, he thinks. An arranger—be it ideas or music. He’s always had a mind for puz­zles, for orga­niz­ing, for mak­ing con­nec­tions and find­ing pat­terns, which his moth­er has been all too hap­py to remind him of every time she asks about his work.

 

8:36.

“You were bril­liant!” she’d say.

 

Were. Not are. Were. As if he’d lost it along the way and she griev­ed the fact that her poor, once-bril­liant son was des­tined for a life of dis­ap­point­ment, of medi­oc­rity, of unmet potential.

 

8:37.

Are his sis­ters also a source of dis­may? Know­ing Moth­er, the answer is a resound­ing yes. For who in all the world could live up to Mother’s expec­ta­tions? No one, he decid­ed long ago—not least of all Moth­er. Destined—every one of them—to drown in a deep sea of dis­ap­point­ment. But at least they’re all drown­ing together.

 

8:38.

Togeth­er metaphor­i­cal­ly. He knows the old­est lives in Boston now. The youngest in Dublin—which he’s nev­er been to, come to think of it. And the mid­dle one, he hon­est­ly can’t remem­ber. Sacra­men­to? Hong Kong? Lon­don? Berlin? Didn’t she trav­el through Spain and Por­tu­gal last year? He doesn’t know.

 

8:39.

It’s not his job to keep track of them any­way. Isn’t that the old­est sibling’s role?

 

8:40.

She nev­er had any sisters—she who is fast asleep. An only child. A thing he often thinks would’ve well-suit­ed his own dis­po­si­tion. He’d have been an incred­i­ble only child. No question.

 

8:41.

An only child like Uld­is. Well, not exact­ly like Uld­is, but an only child, nonethe­less. And what must it have been like for Uld­is upon emerg­ing from that under­ground bunker, dis­cov­er­ing a world beyond the fac­to­ry, beyond its crum­bling brick walls and high, rust­ed iron gate? All that snow! And did the bright­ness hurt his eyes, unac­cus­tomed as they were to tak­ing in so much sun­light? What must he have thought when he saw those snow-capped peaks beyond the white meadow—in fact, sur­round­ing it on all sides? Did he know they were moun­tains? Could his eyes make sense of all they saw? They say that blind people—when they have been born blind and then see for the first time—cannot rec­og­nize faces or make sense of three-dimen­sion­al­i­ty. Their eyes and brains bom­bard­ed with a steady stream of alien shapes and shock­ing­ly bright colors.

 

8:42.

But then, if one is born blind, do they still pic­ture things, call forth images with­out ref­er­ence points, see­ing them in their mind’s eye? Or is the world one of smell, touch, taste and sound? Can descrip­tive lan­guage con­jure up images in the brain of an unsight­ed per­son? Or, con­verse­ly, sound in the brain of one who can­not hear? Or taste in one whose palate can­not dif­fer­en­ti­ate sweet from salty or sour from spicy?

 

8:43.

Sure­ly some­one else has thought these same thoughts before.

 

8:44.

But what of Uld­is? In time, he would make his way to anoth­er town in the coun­try­side, where someone—at least one person—can com­mu­ni­cate with him. A dame called Dagmar—which is fun to say aloud. But not a dame in the tra­di­tion­al sense, not a woman of noble breed­ing or high class. No, a dame in the old-fash­ioned, slangy sense of the word. A broad. A gal. A woman.

 

8:45.

Do peo­ple still refer to women as “dames”? He can’t remem­ber. He’d con­sult the doz­ing dame beside him, but he dares not dis­turb her as she dreams.

 

8:46.

Is that thun­der he hears?

 

8:47.

He hears rain pelt­ing the win­dow. He was hop­ing, today, for sun­shine. Alas, they’re inside for anoth­er drea­ry day.

 

8:48.

Uld­is and Dag­mar. Uld­is. An odd name. Why has the author assigned him this han­dle? Vil­nus, he thinks, would be a more inter­est­ing, eas­i­er to remem­ber name. But per­haps it’s too close to Vil­nius, the Lithuan­ian city ref­er­enced in that nov­el by the Amer­i­can author whose name he can nev­er remember.

 

8:49.

And Dag­mar, a Dan­ish expat. A dame—no, woman. He’ll go with woman. A woman who’s hiked halfway across Europe and Asia in the last six years. Why? To see what’s out there, she tells Uldis—something he is also quite eager to dis­cov­er. And where is next for Dagmar?

 

“Siberia,” she says.

 

“What’s Siberia?”

 

“It is the fur­thest east, the most remote region I could think of. It is the end of the world. And once I reach it, I think it will be my last des­ti­na­tion. No more dis­cov­er­ies. No more treks to far-flung cities. That,” she tells him, “is where my jour­ney will end.”

 

8:50.

Nev­er, in her six years of cross-con­ti­nen­tal trav­el, had Dag­mar encoun­tered such a pecu­liar per­son as the orphan, Uld­is. No mat­ter how many ques­tions she asked, she could not fig­ure out where exact­ly he had come from or why he and his father lived for so long in that base­ment beneath the shoe fac­to­ry. He could not describe the path he had tak­en to arrive in this vil­lage, nor did he have any sense of which direc­tion he had come from. North, south, east, west—these points of ref­er­ence meant noth­ing to him. All he had to offer was a place called “the snowy white mead­ow”, a place she knew she had lit­tle hope of ever finding.

 

8:51.

“We are in a place called Lithua­nia. Have you heard of it before? Per­haps it was men­tioned in one of your father’s stories?”

 

But Father had nev­er spo­ken of such a place.

 

8:52.

Dag­mar told him about Lithua­nia, and of the sur­round­ing regions. She spoke of Latvia and Fin­land and Nor­way, of Poland and Czecho­slo­va­kia and Roma­nia and France and Spain and Eng­land and the Nether­lands. She recount­ed tales from her trav­els across the con­ti­nent of Europe, pro­vid­ing Uld­is with an in-depth expla­na­tion of the dif­fer­ence between a vil­lage and a city and a coun­try and a continent.

 

8:53.

Dag­mar from Den­mark. A dis­graced dietit­ian who, after more than a decade of pro­mot­ing dubi­ous diet­ing prac­tices, saw the light on the road to Dubrovnik and turned from her wicked ways. Dagmar’s days of deceit were end­ed, and she had ded­i­cat­ed her­self there­after to find­ing a new call­ing, one she would search for till the end of her days. For what else was her years-long trek across Europe but a jour­ney toward find­ing a pur­pose in the sec­ond half of her life?

 

8:54.

And what is his pur­pose, this man in the dark­ened room of some hotel he couldn’t remem­ber the name of in a town he hoped nev­er to return to? Does he believe in such things as pur­pose? He’s not sure he does—not any­more, at least. But she—she is a dif­fer­ent sto­ry. And not she—as in Dag­mar, though she also believed in pur­pose. She who shares his bed, enjoy­ing the sweet slum­ber that eludes him.

 

8:55.

She believes in so many things. Too many, he often thinks. Believes in God and an after­life. Horo­scopes and per­son­al­i­ty-type tests and rein­car­na­tion. And for a while, hyp­no­sis. But also in fam­i­ly and—in a way that makes him cringe—a kind of nation­al pride. And celebrations—she believes in those. And the impor­tance of a well-thought-out itin­er­ary. She believes in com­post­ing, in own­ing more than one set of bed sheets, and in tak­ing off one’s shoes when­ev­er enter­ing a home—or even this hotel room. And in lis­ten­ing to audio­books and then telling every­one she has read the book, even though she hasn’t done the hard work of star­ing at the page and read­ing every word, every sen­tence, every para­graph. She believes in her hus­band, that he is an intel­li­gent and inter­est­ing man, that they will remain in love until one or both of them even­tu­al­ly expires, and she believes that he will be an excep­tion­al­ly decent father to the half-formed fetus now wig­gling in her womb.

 

8:56.

Mean­while, he believes this morn­ing might go on for­ev­er, that his dear­ly beloved will sleep until lunchtime. And he wish­es he pos­sessed her abil­i­ty to fall (and stay) asleep so effort­less­ly. But no, he is eas­i­ly star­tled awake, not one to fall back asleep once his morn­ing eyes have caught a glimpse of sunlight.

 

8:57.

She, too, was an ear­ly bird, that dame from Den­mark. Ris­ing each morn­ing with the sun and some­how keep­ing awake long after it went back down. Oh, to be able to func­tion on so lit­tle sleep as she did. In meet­ing Uld­is, she had found some­one to talk the day away with. But what had Dag­mar done when she trav­eled those lone­ly, emp­ty roads with no one to talk to, noth­ing to occu­py her but her own thoughts? It was then that Dag­mar dreamed, dreamed of a des­ti­na­tion miles and miles to the east—a place called Siberia.

 

8:58.

Siberia: A state of mind. An imag­i­nary place. Snowy, seclud­ed, beyond reach. He can’t even remem­ber now—is Siberia a region, a state, a town?

 

8:59.

Siberia. Dag­mar. And the oth­er one, Uvis. Ulvis? No, that’s not it. Ulvid? Maybe. Prob­a­bly not. But some­thing like it, some oth­er U name. Why that name? What does it mean?

 

9:00.

The clock strikes nine.

 

9:01.

No 9 o’clock alarm either.

 

9:02.

Dag­mar from Den­mark. Ulvid the Under­ground Orphan? Too absurd. Ulvid, Urchin of the Under­world? More pre­pos­ter­ous. But maybe a lit­tle bet­ter. Ulvid the Unknown—or Unknow­able, or Unlearned. Un…Un…loved? The worst one yet.

 

9:03.

How did his sto­ry arrive here? He had want­ed, once, to go to Europe, to trav­el from its west­ern­most reach­es all the way to its bor­der with mys­te­ri­ous Rus­sia. But he was just out of school, job­less, direc­tion­less, unaware, then, that his life would soon be con­sumed with those ordi­nary tasks so cen­tral to keep­ing one­self busy, housed, and fed.

 

9:04.

The time to embark upon this free-wheel­ing vision quest across that far-off con­ti­nent across the sea grad­u­al­ly slipped away. There was no space in his life for a jour­ney with no fixed des­ti­na­tion. Had he the time, he would be like Dag­mar and hike over the moun­tains, stroll across the rolling hill­sides and down through the val­leys. He would seek out the most remote cor­ners of the world, places not des­ig­nat­ed on any maps he’d ever seen, in the hope that he could see as much as it was pos­si­ble for one man to see. And maybe, along the way, he’d stum­ble across a bug or plant or rock that no oth­er per­son on Earth had ever seen. And he would be the first and only per­son in all of his­to­ry to encounter it…

 

9:05.

But this he did not do.

And so he is left only to imagine.

The fan hums.

And the room is still dark.

And she lies there, snor­ing softly.

And he con­tin­ues to sweat.

And—

Wait!

 

9:06.

She stirs.

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

It start­ed in Chica­go, in a dingy hotel I can no longer remem­ber the name of, on a morn­ing when it was already much too hot and I was much too dehy­drat­ed. That feel­ing of being stuck, trapped, hav­ing to wait indef­i­nite­ly in a place you don’t want to be—this was the start of my sto­ry. And as I typed, I let my mind wan­der, noticed myself becom­ing more inter­est­ed in the imag­ined world con­struct­ed by my pro­tag­o­nist. I’m drawn to sto­ries that hint at ful­ly-devel­oped worlds that the read­er can nev­er ful­ly inves­ti­gate: imag­ined book titles or made-up authors. Ref­er­ences to fic­ti­tious events or places. How did Uld­is and Father come to live in their under­ground home? What might be con­tained with­in the pages of Reimetoff’s Con­clu­sion or The Machine Eter­nal: Tran­sub­stan­ti­at­ed Tech­nolo­gies Vol. I & II? Some­times it’s more fun to let the read­er decide for them­selves. I was struck some years ago by how com­pelling a sto­ry can be with­out con­ven­tion­al plot, or when most or even all of the sto­ry takes place with­in one character’s head. In the same way our weary, sleep-deprived brains can take us on sur­pris­ing digres­sions and asso­ci­a­tions, I want­ed for this sto­ry to take read­ers on a sim­i­lar jour­ney, for them to feel that the sto­ry was being thought up on the page as they read. “Insom­no­lent Rumi­na­tions” was my attempt at writ­ing such a story.

Arthur Abramov is a New York-based writer, painter, and sculptor.