by Anthology
“Victoria Paylow, I believe you said.”
“That is correct.”
“What would you be knowing about this young person, Gordon?”
“That she knows you as Ivar, and sleeps with you at UCLA with six people looking on. There’s a fair amount of apparatus involved, I gather.”
“Where’d you come across Vicki, Gordon?”
“She called here yesterday. Looking for you. You’ve got to learn finesse in dealing with the opposite sex, Quentin. When you make a date to sleep with them and don’t show up, they worry. So do all the people standing around.”
“Damn it, I called in and left word with the Project secretary that I couldn’t make it, she must have forgotten to tell them. The Omen were rehearsing for a record date and I had to be there in case they needed some lyric changes. Listen, how come Vicki was calling you to track me down?”
“Would it occur to her that you might be at home, when you write lyrics around the clock with your collaborator?”
“Collaborator?”
“She has the distinct impression that that’s my function in your life, Quentin.”
“I never used that word, Gordon, I swear it, all I said was, you’re kind of editor with my stuff. I’m searingly sorry she bothered you, Gordon.”
“She has to be set straight, Quentin. She must be made to understand that I’m not your collaborator, you’re my contaminator. Now. Two more things need clearing up. First, why you leave this girl’s number for me to reach Quentin at, when she knows you as Ivar. Second, regarding this Sleep Project, what, exactly—”
“Who left Vicki’s number for anything, Gordon? Are you completely crazed?”
“I direct your attention to the night of the cracking knuckles, Quentin. You left a number for me to call. It was Vicki’s number. Vicki said she’d never heard of a Quentin, which was true. What would lead you to do such a rabid—”
“Syllogism serenade sweatshirt. This is a bummer. I was stoned, that was the thing. I must of plain forgot she knew me as Ivar. Oh, so no wonder you thought it was the wrong number. I get it now. Bllb. It was a slip on my part, from being stoned. Leaving that number altogether was a slip, if I did it. Grrz. I had the thought in the back of my head of going over to her place, that much I know. I was cracking my knuckles and getting tensed up and the urge was on me to drop over to Vicki’s, I don’t know why. The thing with the knuckles just naturally made me think of going to Vicki’s. I guess, being stoned, I just translated going there as being there, mixed up the wish and the result, so I left her number without realizing what I was doing. I really meant to drive over there but instead I passed out—”
“How did you know her address and phone number? She tells me she wouldn’t give them to you and she’s not listed—”
“Not in the phone book, no. But she is in the personnel files at the Project. I’ve had the idea of paying her a visit for some time, Gordon. I’ve had my eye on her at the Project, been building up some major urges about her. I’ll confess something. The urges got so major, I hung around the Project office one day until the secretary got called out, then I sneaked a look in the filing cabinet, located Vicki’s personnel record and memorized the salient facts. Look, it’s complicated. I’d have to reconstruct the whole situation for you. Where it begins is with the Sleep Project”
“I’d better know about that, too. Just try to spare me the details, such as why they need a secretary.”
“You don’t know about the Project, Gordon? Ah, then. None of this can make any sense to you, that’s obvious. That’s where I met Vicki, at the Project. They found out we sleep well together, for some reason, so they schedule us to do it together, for reasons they won’t explain. I use the name Ivar Nalyd over there for the same reason I use it on my songs—”
“Let me see if I’m following. You get paid for your activities at the Project?”
“Sure, Gordon, why else would I be putting in all that time? Sure, I get good hourly rates, so does Vicki. So, see, because I make money there, I figured, better do it under the alias, so my old man won’t hear about it and stop the allowance. Listen, I’ve got to take off now. Due at the Project. How about coming out with me and see the setup for yourself, it’s wild? Dr. Wolands likes visitors. Gordon, this is a whole new approach to a crucial human function. Look at it this way, here’s a thing you do every day of your life, yet you’re a blank about it. It’s like your knuckles cracking, the most intimate thing and you don’t know what’s going on. They’re studying every aspect at the Project, they go into it real deep, it’ll open your eyes . . .”
I had to go, of course. There were witless laminations between Quentin and Vicki, not as many as he would like, more than she warmed to. They made a leaky sandwich which had insinuated itself into my life, leaking from all sides. I felt a need to trace it to the bughouse short-order kitchen in which it had been put together, called, for some reason, the Sleep Project. To get this picture straight, I would have climbed any Mah Own Tang Quentin led me up. Followed him into any unhinged heaven, even if the temperature was seven. Had his name been Mao, I’d still gao.
As we drove along, Quentin told me something about Victoria Paylow. Graduate student at UCLA in history. Doing master’s thesis on the sadomasochistic aspects of late medieval sorcery, demonology, witchcraft, black masses, and alchemy. Played good guitar. Carried guitar around to play and sing Omen numbers to herself at odd moments. Adored Omen songs, particularly their lyrics, particularly those lyrics written by him, Quentin, Ivar. Her enthusiasm for said lyrics so intense as to suggest she had a big yen for him which she was trying to cover up by refusing to give him her phone number. Very vital presence to have sleeping next to you. Increasingly, the focal point of the increasingly agitated dreams Quentin was having at the Project. More spectacularly stacked than the Queen Mary.
“Quentin,” I said cautiously, “about the night of the knuckles. If I recall, you said you started the cracking, then the others joined in?”
“That’s the way it went, yes.”
“Do you remember why you started it? What train of thought you were in when you began bending your fingers?”
“Oh, I was thinking about Vicki, I guess. These days a major part of my thinking is about Vicki.”
“Can you recall what you were thinking about her, exactly?”
“Mmp, well, I guess I was thinking about her skirt. She wears this miniskirt to the Project, see, actually it’s more micro than mini, a figleaf stretched just enough to wrap around is what it amounts to. I devote a lot of thought to that flyspeck of a skirt, that iota of a skirt, what you might call that soupcon of a cover, just this side of bareass. I was thinking about that little-as-the-law-allows garment, then about reaching for some scissors, then beginning to snip at the skirt with the scissors. Yep, that’s about the sequence. I was cutting away, and humming. And thinking, get this, about the La Brea Tar Pits, thinking they should be called the La Brea Arm Pits, though they’re between the legs, and laughing to myself. Then there was this voice. Her voice. I was imagining it, of course, remember I was some miles from my skull from this rich grass. The voice was loud, deep, and aggressive. Deeper than a bass. It said, you keep that up and I’ll give your hands a whack that’ll turn your knuckles to mush. Those are the exact words. The liquid threat first, then it said, fool around like that and I’ll crack your knuckles in half, plus each and every other bone in your body. The fracture threat. At that, you can bet, I dropped the imaginary skirt and then the imaginary scissors. All because of this imaginary voice, full of melts and breakages, which rattled my ears. That was when, sure, I began to crack my knuckles. Say, I’m glad you asked this question. It clears some things up. No wonder I got scared from the cracking. Actually I was already scared from the voice’s threats against my knuckles.”
“So you’d say the nervous cracking stemmed from some prior thoughts, imaginings, about Vicki.”
“Gordon, I not only would, I just did.”
We
rode a while longer.
“Have you ever noticed, Quentin, how often references to fluids and bones come into your conversation?”
“I don’t know. Plenty of people talk about fluids and bones, they figure in everybody’s life.”
“In yours more than in some, I’d say. You like to keep your fluids in one category, your bones in another, and it annoys you when people get the categories mixed. I mention it because just now, when you remembered about this voice, you quoted it as threatening to hammer your knuckles to mush. The concept of reducing your osseous materials to liquid form would seem to disturb you, I think that’s a reasonable conclusion. Do you link this concept in any way with Vicki?”
“That’s a big batch of silliness, Gordon. True, the threat was in Vicki’s voice, but I was hallucinating, the voice was in my head, not coming from the outside.”
“True, but it was your head that, after originating the words, put them in Vicki’s mouth. You were the author, but it seemed important to put quotes around the words and attribute them to Vicki.”
“Gordon, I don’t know where you’re trying to get with this line of questioning. What’s the whole question of solids and liquids got to do with Vicki, anyway?”
“I don’t know, Quentin. But I have to ask you to stop cracking your knuckles and put your hands back on the steering wheel before you kill us both.”
Scientism is not for me. What are called the laws of Nature I take as gossip. They tell us a balloon filled with hot air rises because of Boyle’s Law, specific gravities, etc. I know different. I know that the balloon goes up because the sun sucks it up. How do I come by this information? By empathy, because my own head is often subject to the sun’s powerful suction, is heliotropic, so much so that my neck and shoulder muscles are pulled tight a good deal of the time, to keep my head in place. Medical men tell me this is neurotic tension but I know it for a healthy attempt to keep the organism in one piece. The migraine sometimes produced by this muscle strain is healthy, too, the head’s reassuring signal, in the only language it has, that it’s very much with me against all cosmic sabotage. Again, think about the peculiar behavior of water when the temperature drops below 32° Fahrenheit. This has always struck me as a highly emotional, and sick, reaction to unpleasantness, like the rigidification you see in certain advanced cases of schizophrenia. Well, science puts the stress on matter, art, on manner. This is probably not news to you.
The point is that I understood no part of the laboratory Quentin led me into. The large main room was laced with wires and cables leading to wall panels on which dials jigged and styluses twitched across revolving drums. Off this central room was a row of cubicles visible through wide walls of glass. Each contained a bed, plus a desk with a typewriter on it. In several of the beds people, men and women, were fast asleep. Electrodes were taped to assorted parts of the sleepers’ bodies, including their skulls. Technicians in white smocks sat in the main room, following the electronic messages being sent out by the sleeping parties. In one cubicle a man in pajamas, apparently just come awake, sat at the desk, typing energetically.
This, Quentin informed me, was the Sleep Center, where that crucial human activity, sleep, was being investigated from every angle, probed to the bottom. It was only in their waking hours, Quentin let me know, that men allowed themselves to be separated by the artificial barriers of color, ethnics, politics, ideology, hunger, territorial imperatives. In their repose all men were one because all slept, and slept alike. Sleep, you might almost say, was humanity’s least common denominator, because most common, indeed, universal. Sun makes men aliens to each other and, thus, themselves. Night unites. Mankind could open itself to, and assert, its true physiological community only with eyes closed. The Sleep Project, by ferreting out the true race-wide nature of sleep, was going to show all men their mutuality. The way to a lasting One World was to be revealed to us by that least likely leader, Morpheus, plus his right-hand men, his buddies, Somnus and Hypnos. In Thanatopsis our eyes would for the first time be opened. We would in the end cast off our false gods and pay full respect to His Worship Nod, the Sandman with his ingratiating sands. Something like that. He was very likely going to write a song about it. I couldn’t follow the argumentation because I was getting sleepy.
The chief psychologist had joined us during this impromptu lecture. He nodded his approval of the explication by Quentin, now Ivar Nalyd, who, he said, was this lab’s champion sleeper, though sometimes carried away in his poeticized claims about the lab’s work. Quentin introduced us. The man in the starched smock, truncated, coaly-haired, crisply managerial in manner if pudgy in matter, was Dr. Jerome Wolands. Dr. Wolands greeted my name with the precise opposite of somnolence. He took in so much air so rapidly, I expected all the Pentel pens in his breast pocket to pop.
“Gordon Rengs!” he said. “No! You can’t be!”
“I wish they’d told me sooner,” I said.
“Gordon Rengs! This is an occasion!”
“For me to leave immediately, unless you calm down.”
“No! Fantastic! I’ve read every word you ever wrote!”
Quentin, Ivar, took this as an occasion, not to leave, not to fall asleep like a champion, simply to put in something obnoxious. He said, “Doc, if those are the only words you’ve ever read, you’re in trouble.”
“I’m serious, Mr. Rengs,” Wolands said. “In fact, it was a book of yours, Messages, Hints, that led me to study psychology.”
I was not pleased with the undercurrent that he might have been led to psychology to figure out why he read me. Quentin had another interpretation: “I get your meaning, Doc. That book kept putting you to sleep, so you went into the psychology of sleep, to stay awake.”
“No, this man’s work kept me awake nights,” Wolands said. “He raises so many questions about how and why men claw at each other, up to the level of shooting wars, I turned to psychology to find some answers, and get my sleep again. Well. We’re certainly honored a man like you should take an interest in our investigations, Mr. Rengs. Believe it or not, through our studies of sleep we’re learning a considerable amount about how and why people provoke each other.”
“It’s a provocative approach,” I said. “What’s the basic idea, that if you make people sleep a lot you’ll cut down on wars?”
“It’s not the sleepers who make wars,” Wolands reminded me.
“Not while they’re sleeping, anyway.”
“Mr. Rengs, well-rested people don’t hit each other, asleep or awake. If we can get the insomniacs dozing off again, and improve the repose of the tossers and turners, you see how that ushers in a new epoch. The next great slogan may be, Sleepers of the world, unite! Conceivably that’s the only way men can ever forge the true communitas, in sleep. If we can just get them to sleeping soundly again, and that’s not a reference to snoring”
This loonily Utopian dissertation on the politics of sleep was interrupted by the arrival of a bouncy, bubbly, extravagantly larded girl, the lab’s runner-up sleeper, the one contender to Ivar’s title. Victoria Paylow, of course. Carrying her guitar. She stretched outsize blue eyes at me in the very act of winking broadly. I was disturbed by this capacity of hers to enlarge her optic diameters in the process of a signifying contraction. How she managed to convey openness, readiness, a lusty receptivity, with a very literal narrowness of outlook, I don’t know. It seemed a trick, in a totally unexpected area, for blending fluids and bones.
She was, in fact, wearing a miniskirt that had the proportions of an iota, even a soupcon. It did, in fact, invite thoughts of scissoring. Ivar was, in fact, studying it in a scissory silence.
“Hi, Mr. Rengs,” she said, her two-way-stretch voice as elastic as her eyes. I considered the emotional gamut of a female who could make dock-walloper threats to rip out tongues one minute, utter a chirpy Future Farmers hi the next. “You come down here to see some world-champ sleeping?”
“I like to observe people who are outstanding in any field,” I said.
“We don’t do it standing,” she said. “Doing it on your feet is for amateurs.”
“If you keep on standing around, Mr. Rengs will question your professional standing,” Wolands said. “Hop to it, kids.”
Quentin and Victoria waved to me and slipped out a door. Very soon they reappeared in two of the vacant cubicles, adjoining ones, now dressed in pajamas. In a businesslike, practiced way they arranged themselves in their respective beds and lay still while lab assistants attached wires to all parts of their bodies, including their heads. They seemed unaware of each other and us. Wolands explained that they were in audio-visual isolation: blank wall between them, the windows we looked through were one-way glass. Soon they were alone, eyes closed. Soon after, they were asleep, as Wolands thought he proved by calling my attention to the movements of dials, gauges, meters, and recording styluses.
“You’re going to see some very special sleeping here today,” Wolands said. “Ivar and Vicki have real gifts for this. More than they know. Interlocking gifts.”
I recalled that Quentin had a good deal of Irish blood in him. Vicki had a colleen sauciness about her. I refrained from saying that this might be the lock of the Irish.
“Do you appreciate the full significance of what’s going on here, Mr. Rengs?”
“Something that’ll wreck the music world? Ivar writes lyrics, you know. I can’t believe he writes what he does in a waking state. I assume he creates them when he’s asleep.”
“It goes far beyond lyrics. Have you heard talk about our recent discovery, REM sleep?”
“You’ve discovered a new kind of sleep?”
“No, brought to light a very, very old type. REM means Rapid Eye Movement, Mr. Rengs. Every 90 minutes or so our subjects show signs of intense neural-cortical activity. Their alpha brainwaves energize and their eyes begin to move fast, as though watching something. They are watching something. A dream, which accounts for the sudden jump in cerebral energies. The typical sleep pattern is to dream every 90 minutes, Mr. Rengs, in other words, to show high alpha-wave and REM activity every 90 minutes. Part of our job here is to wake certain subjects after each REM episode and get them to write down as much of their dream as they remember. We’re learning revolutionary things about dreams. That they take place several times a night. That they release clamoring unused energies in the brain which, unless drained off during the alpha-REM phases, would in short order make us psychotic.”
