A Fox Disappearing in the Air
Distortions
IT’S TWO A.M. and I’m walking past the building that is haunted by ghosts or things that look like ghosts. The headlights of a passing car throw shadows up against the wall, suggesting the shapes of the trees and bushes. The car moves on and the whole world turns purple. A fox runs out of a bush, jumps into the air, and disappears.
Sleeplessness can cause hallucinations which, when prolonged, can lead to encounters with alternate realities. This has something to do with the abstracted spatiality of nighttime, the way shadows superimpose things in the visual field to reveal unexpected relations between them. It also has something to do with delirium, which generates all kinds of unexpected visual effects: wandering spirits, shape-shifting objects, wormholes opening and closing. These effects kick in after a couple of days without sleep and are preceded by a crowding or swarming sensation that I can only describe as the feeling you get when people are commuting to and from work in another world.
I’ve been wanting to write about these effects for a while now, but there’s something about the whole thing that makes writing seem unappealing. A ghost appears at the foot of my bed and I lose interest in literature, close my laptop.
Earlier this year I made a commitment to writing truthfully. I made this commitment because I had gotten into the habit of distorting the world for the benefit of a good story—a habit which, if we take seriously the idea that nonfiction is the pursuit of truth, had estranged me from the reason I was writing in the first place. I ransacked my old essays, deleted pages of exaggeration and ambiguity. It was during this time that I stopped writing about insomnia entirely.
