Winter Brothers by Ivan Doig

Author:Ivan Doig
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Day Forty

A silver-bright day. Air clear and cold, ready to crinkle like silk, and for the second night in a row frost has daubed its way all across the ground and up into the first branches of the evergreens.

I have a queer edgy clarity in myself, consequence of so few hours’ sleep: a grittiness like diamond dust. Luckily, sleeplessness comes to me in small seasons, two or three nights in a row then vanishes, else I cannot imagine what my daily mood would be like. These strange beings, ourselves. Needing the night but sometimes entirely at odds with it. My nights when sleep will not be coaxed I roll like a driftlog on one of Swan’s beaches, and between last bedtime and early morning I wallowed a deep trough in the dark. In the bed beside mine, Carol’s breathing form calmly ingested the blackness, channeled it on its smooth underskin routes. While my mind was a black blaze. Anything makes fuel; a walk taken around the neighborhood after supper, the day’s writing, a letter from a friend. I steadily try a number of sleepmaking stunts. Breathe deeply, with forced regular rhythm. Let my tongue loll like a loosened strap. Try to sheet the mind with a white blankness. And have the success of a man attempting to win attention to his coin trick against the roaring backdrop of a three-ring circus.

The frustration is double. Sleep at best is a sharp cost of time, not-sleep is a cost to both. Yet not always; there is this morning’s cold clarity, as if the white duff of frost had crept into me during the night too.

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