Alpha Waves

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The psychiatrist specialized in sleep disorders. The first day we met in his private clinic he explained he was into rules. This was well before we began a relationship outside of the confines of his north London office that overlooked a pretty, gated square; one of those secret gardens that sit in tiny pockets across the city, locked away from those without permission to enter.

I hadn’t expected him to be handsome, just old — turns out he was both. He had soft dark grey hair that fell in wafts around his face. I liked the way his green eyes were sharp and yet empty, they matched his tie. The tiny red vessels on the surface of his nose moved up and down as he spoke, often at length. Insomnia had made me pay attention to these kinds of details. I became hyperaware of the body and its tricks. 

On that first day, I learned rule number one: the bedroom should only be for two things – sleep and fucking. All other activity was prohibited. He spoke plainly in a crisp London accent, crisp as a blade. I admired the way he leaned back in his rotatable chair like a throne, except when his stocky torso would gesture forwards at moments of scientific explanation when he became the most animated. He discussed everything from the early zebrafish research that was fundamental to how we now define the circadian rhythm to human experiments which entailed locking up participants in completely windowless rooms for a month with no sense of time. Participants would have their meals delivered when they wanted and could sleep or stay up for as long as they felt was appropriate. No clocks allowed. People with long sleep cycles would sleep for more than twelves hours each night. At the end of the experiment, this group of participants would be surprised when the research leaders released them, feeling the month had passed by all too quickly. For those with short sleep cycles only feeling the need to sleep for a few hours at night, a day would pass in a fraction of a real one. They would cycle through multiple short days so that a month period would be felt as more than two. The experience must be akin to hell, the sleep psychiatrist would say before laughing showing off his little irregular teeth.  He liked to explain things to me often. I liked the sense that I could be of use just by listening.

I had been feeling useless for a long while. It was spring and I hadn’t slept properly for eight months. My family doctor, Dr. Link who had treated me since I was a child with frequent ear infections and a mild case of sebaceous acne, had only started to worry when I stopped getting my period. When I told Link this, he looked up for what felt like the first time in six months. I had gotten so used to seeing the top of his shiny bald head. It was a shock to see the downward pull of his now sagging face. I was told this was now very serious indeed, as he jabbed away at the keyboard in front of him, entering his findings into my notes.

I had noticed things were serious much earlier, when my hair had started to thin, falling out in soft drifts overnight as I tossed and turned in bed. I began collecting the dark strands that became clumps and eventually bought a large glass jar to contain the growing mass of keratin. The jar became darker and darker until completely blacked with hair. The more hair, the less sleep I’d had. This was my only tangible way of keeping track of anything real in the world, one strand at a time. Not being able to sleep is a kind of torture, in the sense you never know what is real anymore, with the exception of something as real and undeniable as hair. You lie awake never dreaming, only thinking about the light in the room changing gradually as dawn arrives and you remain unsleeping. Unsleep is a territory. A limbo state dislocated from the world. An insomniac moves around differently in their exhausted body. The brain fidgets uncontrollably like a flapping fish caught up in a fisherman’s net. You lie there in a state of continuing, hoping the fish plays dead, and doesn’t get put back into water for as long as possible. I remember my mother returning from night shifts at the care home she used to work at, half-awake zombie-like as she made us breakfast. How she pulled on her dressing gown over her normal clothes just to keep from shivering. Her cheeks sallow, almost green with exhaustion. Now I get out of bed and spend my time up late, staring out the window. I like to listen to the rumble of infrequent cars passing by, wondering where they are headed. You begin to pay attention to the sound of the nighttime as if you could hear the swelling and contracting of the air outside the window. 

I had no choice but to take any help I could get and the sleep psychiatrist had come highly recommended. We began to meet once then as often as twice a week in his office. As well as his detailed explanations, almost lectures, he often elaborated with diagrams that he signed off at the bottom with his signature, like the time he drew me a tank of oil. His hand was steady as he cut through the piece of white paper as pale as his hand with his Montblanc. I noticed his fingers tapered towards the ends, the nails were cut neat, he wore no ring. He said, pointing to the diagram, this was my sleep tank: the oil was the daytime activity I would need to do if I had any chance of filling it up, in order to sleep peacefully at night. He made three flamboyant slashes with his inky pen to highlight the area of activity, or oil, I would need to collect. His eyes met mine as if a gaze could make a sound as it struck.

After our second session when he put his hand on my thigh and up my skirt, which wasn’t strictly required for the examination, I felt the cool energy of his palms against my tights, something trance-like about the way the sleep psychiatrist hovered awkwardly over my body, and yet, I still felt exhausted. He said he could sense my jangled nerves, the depleted serotonin levels which all contributed to my sleep disorder, presumably he had detected this under the skirt. As he lingered, his coffee and cigarette-stained breath felt cool against my neck. I could see people walking through the square below between the trees, their bodies popping in and out of frame. I felt like a bird looking down on the world. Life had become a kind of big dull mosaic that you could only really pay attention to in small segments at a time, the whole picture remaining elusive — I really did want to sleep.

One of my habits is to cover the lower part of my face with my hand when asleep, usually in the middle of the day having been up all night. The psychiatrist made a note of this in his leather notebook and often commented on it whilst we were in the middle of making love on his kitchen floor. He liked to do it there — aware of his bedroom rules, he used to joke and say “No one said anything about fucking in other rooms.” From far away, with my hand over my nose and mouth, it looks like I’m smelling a pleasurable thing tucked inside my palm, or as if half-way through gasping, either experiencing pain or pleasure. The sleep psychiatrist said I look like a child unconscious to the world; this is a way he could relate to me. I found this strange as he had no children of his own. His wife left three years before and he didn’t mention her name, although I often heard them speaking on the phone late at night. The sleep psychiatrist often thought I slept, that through his years of experience he had cured my insomnia within a matter of weeks. Meanwhile, I lay awake listening. I could almost feel his hot breath spitting in sharp whispers around the words, “yes, yes,” “fine,” “I’ll send some.” I had the feeling it wasn’t just money, but feelings involved in these late-night calls, although it was hard to tell as he seemed rarely to show anything more than flickers between the extremes of pleasure and absolute seriousness. He just sipped at his sparkling water that he drank exclusively from glass bottles his housekeeper, Magda, kept stocked in his fridge. I got used to hearing the hissing of a fresh cap being opened. I knew he kept one dedicated diary for me, noting down my movements including frequency of bathroom breaks, conversation, type and size of meals. The scrutiny was reciprocal;  as I watched him surreptitiously take down his notes I was considering him, too. 

One evening after he finished, we lay on our backs on the glossy tiles in his kitchen, expertly buffed by Magda, who practically lived in the flat more than he did. I told him about the hand, how I know my mother covers her face like this in her sleep too. I said my mother and I could be exhibited in an art gallery installation. He didn’t ask about it, just let out a single sharp laugh that told me I was being far-fetched and he wouldn’t entertain it. Instead, he got up to wipe off the partly dried cum from the hairy mass below his belly button. I lifted my head to get up before relaxing back down. I remembered how he liked to see me lie there for a while until he’d gotten dressed, I felt the cold tiles slowly evaporate patches of our sweat. I stared up at the ceiling and thought more about my mother and I asleep. Perhaps the artist who exhibited us would be saying something about silence both in and out of the bedroom, but I reminded myself, my body and my mother’s were just sleeping and not pieces of art.

I wanted to ask the sleep psychiatrist about his dreams, about his body in sleep, which remained unusually still, like a car in a sales room, or a dog collapsed from heat exhaustion. I wanted to tell him how unsure I was of my own body, how it moved and changed while I lay unconscious, the hand creeping up to protect my face, to single me out as my mother’s daughter.

I often lay awake until the early hours disobeying all of his rules. I collected the hair that had accumulated on the pillow before he noticed and placed them in a zip-lock bag to add to the jar later. Outside his flat there was no sound. A dumb silence rang out even with the window open to the street beneath. Nothing seemingly moved. Neither did he. His flesh was pink and blotchy in places around his upper chest, especially after he’d had a few glasses of wine. His body was prickly, his chest covered in sparse hair and his face looked old as he slept. He wasn’t overweight but had a small haunch of a belly forming at his age and the muscles around his shoulders, when relaxed, lay puny and depleted. This didn’t compare to how well he looked upright in his suit, commanding his patients, answering the telephone. Some people are meant to always be dressed, I thought. All the while he remained so still in sleep, smelling of cigarettes.

He liked to play games or what he called experiments. On date night, the sleep psychiatrist liked to hook me up to his home electroencephalogram machine, as he pinned the net of wires to my skull he recounted the same information. He said the machine shows you the four stages of sleep as a person experiences them in real time. He showed me the fibrillations of brain activity which looked to me like small and big squiggly lines, as if someone tried to write a note whilst hurtling down a hill at high speed. I told him he would be a great teacher. I imagined these hypothetical students as being not much older than myself, as each new sucker was applied to my head. He ignored this and continued saying, “We are closest to consciousness in the early stages, where the oscillations jump up and down frantically, these are called alpha waves. In this period, we can experience hypnagogic jerks, a single limb or whole-body spasm before we descend into another state.” Here I made a suggestive smile to try to catch his attention but he was too involved in his experiment to notice. He was very passionate about his practice, and he said the most important aspect of any scientific experiment was the proof.

One day he seemed in a particularly excitable mood and persuaded me to get into the chair again in his office. Once the machine was plugged in, he said, with a twinkle in his eye, “Now, I want you to keep this on for the whole week.” I must have looked startled, he continued “Yes, the whole week. I will bring you everything you need to sit here. You’ll be my perfect patient and we must keep all of the conditions stable for a proper, rigorous experiment.” He said he hoped this would lead to research that he would one day publish in the New England Journal of Medicine. I didn’t so much verbally agree as remain.

Throughout that week I didn’t move at all really. I reached out to grasp drinks but the psychiatrist usually brought them towards me and demanded I use the plastic straw he’d bought specially for the job. It was pink and had obviously come from an old packet of novelty birthday straws for kids. When I needed a wee he would place a small bowl underneath my legs while I raised my body high enough to sort of crouch over it like a crow landing in its nest. When I needed to shit, that was more tricky. For this, he would allow me a commode that he’d bought off the internet for a discounted fee, “hospital grade,” he would repeat over and over as he took my daily offering to the toilet and back. I returned to my seat slowly and could hear him in the bathroom washing out the basin, whistling in between answering telephone calls to his dear patients. He was really very rigorous about the conditions. I ate when he gave me food and attempted to sleep but often the lights would go out and I’d be left sitting upright in the armchair, wires silently recording my brain activity in the dark.

The worst part was that he could finally tell. In the morning he would read off the encephalograph and interpret my night. He could see how little I’d slept and it angered him. These were days that were more difficult. He decided that it must be the food causing a disturbance in my nocturnal patterns, and to adjust my diet accordingly at this point, a useful and valid change to the conditions. He would often go to work and leave me for hours without much more than water until he got back in the evening. One time, I wet myself having been too frightened to move on my own.

The experiment went on for weeks, until finally he started coughing up blood into the sink and asked me to come over to check if what was happening was indeed real. Often it’s difficult to see what’s in front of you without someone you love. He had to detach me from the wires and said he was bitterly disappointed that the experiment would now not be conclusive as he caught his breath. Indeed, there was blood in the sink and it was his. I stood there, witness to the proof running away in hot copper streams down the hole.

It’s different when you see someone dead who you knew when they were alive. Like a final uninterpretable silence so unlike sleep. We watched him go on for weeks looking frail and sickly in a hospital side room, no longer in his suit and tie but a paper-thin hospital gown that was unceremoniously hiked up by nurses doing their duties: checking for sacral sores and  his catheter position. I watched with the ex-wife, whose name I finally learned. Her hair was thin, blonde, and perfectly done. Her neck was covered in small freckles and bigger flat moles like battleships, which she covered with a silk neckerchief I could tell from a lifetime of exposure to the sun. She was a kidney specialist he’d trained with at medical school and she did exclusively private practice nowadays.

His view from the window was remarkable. I didn’t say this to the ex who would barely look at me, if only to point her well-polished finger in accusation. She would say how I must have pushed him over the edge, a sick young woman who never deserved him, only to break down in tears until I left. All the while the fluid in the tube that connected the psychiatrist’s chest to the tub on the floor swung back and forth with each of his shallow breaths making a quiet sucking sound.

Sickness here was so unremarkable to be part of the fabric of the room, from the oxygen tubing in his nose to his bucket on the floor, swinging to its own circadian rhythm. I kept thinking how you could see all of north London — the choppy lines of terraced houses and sharp thrusting energy of the city in the distance, and how he couldn’t perceive any of it. In fact, the view was precisely wasted on the sleeping psychiatrist, so I spent most of my time preoccupied with it, giving it some deserved attention. Attention to the whole view, the thing that insomnia had taken from me. For the last few months, I could only concentrate on what was right in front of me, as if unattuned to the expansiveness of the present, instead my attention flitted like a fly up and against the windowpane battling to feel the air. Attention to the scale of the world had returned as I stared out the window mounting each propulsive hill with my gaze. Roof after roof, dislocated Victorian chimneys, hundreds of families in their terraced houses. I thought then of a memory of my mother, more precisely the image of her in sleep, light playing across her face from the dim TV screen she had dozed off in front of. I remember the argument between two characters playing out loudly in front of her body that lay unconscious to the world. I remember tiptoeing to switch it off, trying not to wake her. As the paramedics had wheeled him out into the ambulance after he had begun to cough and cough without stopping, the blood coming thick and fast, I had stayed in the apartment. I’d felt the rush and commotion of the medics leaving the room. After what must have been just a few short minutes, I went over to the chair where I had been placed for so long and switched the machine off, unplugging it at the wall. There was no longer its light buzzing sound to comfort me, just a silence. I lay down in his bed, now emptied as he hurtled to the hospital intensive care unit as I would learn later, and promptly fell asleep.  It shouldn’t have been a surprise when he stopped breathing. By the time the nurse on the ward informed me he’d died, I’d gotten so used to seeing the sick man barely living. The finality gripped me, like a hand around the mouth.