Fetch

By James Alston

 

Sleep; sleep never comes. I lie awake at night staring at the fireworks behind my eyelids, one hour, two hours, three hours, four hours, five hours, and then the alarm goes, and I wake from wakefulness, shuffle to the desk, open the curtains, open the laptop, pretend to listen as my boss talks about user interviews, upcoming features, new developments to our small slice of the tech pie.

The day drags, the butts in the ashtray pile up until I remember to shake them out into the bin, my two-litre bottle of water empties and refills as I try in vain to stay hydrated, and I attend meeting after meeting after meeting. I laugh at bad jokes from my coworkers until the day comes to a close at 17:00, not a minute before but often a minute after.

I scroll through the Instagram news on my phone before forcing myself to the gym on a Monday, for a jog on a Tuesday, to the gym on a Wednesday, for a jog on the Thursday, to the gym on a Friday, the weekend free. In wintertime the nights come in thick and fast and sometimes I don’t bother pulling the curtains because it’s still dark when I wake up.

When the clocks go forward, I always shut them, but I leave the balcony door open and am ravished by mosquitos as I lie awake at night, staring at the red dots on my eyelids, one two three four five six seven hours, until the alarm goes and I wake from wakefulness.

I’ve tried it all to get to sleep, everything but the pills that the doctors won’t give me because I’m ‘too young to be on drugs already’. I exercise until I’m sick through my arse five days a week, but always more than two hours before bedtime. I eat bananas at night, but never so late the energy keeps me awake. I take my Omega-3 and my Vitamin C and my B12, once daily, every morning, with water.

I practise perfect sleep hygiene: in bed every night at exactly the same time, meditation (imagine your head is heavy, imagine it sinking into the pillow, count to ten, now count down from one hundred, now imagine your muscles are like lead weights and you sink into the mattress, etc.), getting up after twenty minutes and going to another room to read a book or stare at the moon out the kitchen window, the moon that lights up the kitchen island and the sun-stained floor, as if you’ve left a corner lamp on, but you haven’t, it’s just the moon, awake all night, asleep during the day.

I use my iPhone to track my sleep through an app: it tells me when I fell asleep (never), when REM started (never), how much light sleep I got (none), how much deep sleep I got (none), when I woke up (always).

I do it all, I do everything but take the pills, the pills they won’t give me, and nothing works, nothing works but being drunk once every second Friday when I force myself out of my waking slumber to the bar and remember it’s the only thing that works, but isn’t something you should do every day, no, that’s worse than the pills, pal.

The problem with insomnia is that it fucks every other aspect of your life. You’re never really asleep and you’re never really awake, Jack said, but that’s not the problem.

The problem is that not sleeping leads to myriad other things, things that, when you have insomnia, you (day)dream about happening: heart failure, heart disease, kidney disease, cancer, diabetes, strokes, obesity, depression, getting into an accident at work because you’re so fucking tired you can barely walk straight. Though not at my work, of course, because I sit at a desk all day long listening to my boss bang on about upcoming features and new developments and the quality of our team’s communication and whether or not we need a webinar on the new AI we’re developing that nobody asked for that writes your emails for you in overly-formal Brontëesque prose.

Paranoia, anxiety, panic attacks, phobias (I am scared of everything). Hallucinations, dementia, weight loss, eventually death. Remember when Jack’s doctor said he couldn’t die from insomnia? That was nonsense. And I dream of it all happening, but I can’t dream, because I can’t sleep.

 

*

 

I first saw myself from the balcony. I was smoking an anomalous cigarette outside rather than lolled over my office chair at my desk. It was early morning, before work, maybe seven thirty, summertime so the sun was shining bright from the east to the right, blinding me but nourishing the little plants I’d planted which were just turning into big plants.

I leaned over the side of the balcony and in front of me, four floors down with his chin upturned towards me, was me. Dressed like me, smoking like me, thousand-yard insomniac stare like me, one arm loosely hanging at his side like me, blue cigarette smoke clouding his face like me, one half - the other half - of his face in the sun like me.

People walked by him as though he weren’t there, but I wasn’t so sure. We stared at one another for a long while, a few minutes or more. He didn’t call up; I didn’t call down. He just looked at me, and I looked at him.

I would have stayed staring at him forever, trying to work out if he was a proper doppelgänger or if he was a figment of my imagination, but my alarm went and I had to go inside to open my laptop and open the curtains and hear my boss talking about new developments to our intelligent new feature, the new customer success employee, the new SEO freelancer who was going to improve our blog rankings, so I turned and went back inside and opened up my laptop and logged in and joined the meeting with my camera off and tried to fall asleep in my chair.

After the meeting was over, I was meant to edit a blog post written by a freelancer who could barely string two sentences together but was still working for us because she was cheap.

But instead of doing that I went back outside to the balcony and looked down over the side to see if I could see myself, but I wasn’t there. So, I collected my cigarettes and spent the rest of the day sitting and standing among my plants, watching the street to see if I showed up again. I never did.

 

*

 

I’d had a landline installed the week before because I was sick of spending so much time on my phone. Nobody called it, of course, but it was there, and I had a home number, and it made the flat feel like my own place, rather than a rented space that belonged to some rich Danish man who didn’t even live in this city, who just owned the building and never bothered to get the letting company round to fix the leaky roof or the broken lights in the back wing of the block or the main door that didn’t shut properly.

One evening it rang for the first time.

The landline was in the kitchen so I took a cigarette and the bottle of beer I was drinking - just the one, on school nights, never more than one - and picked it up.

‘Yello?’

There was nothing but static on the other end of the line, silence, a slight clicking noise, ambience.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi, J. You all right?’ The voice that came back was slightly high-pitched, a little nasal, a hint of Estuary but mostly Received, quick with a mumbling touch. It was my own voice.

‘Who is this?’

‘It’s you.’

‘Very funny. Who is this?’

‘It’s literally you.’

‘Right. I don’t know who you are, but this is pretty weird. Just tell me who you are.’

The voice enunciated every word as if there were full stops after each. ‘I. Am. You.’

I said nothing, waited for the person to say something else, but they didn’t.

‘All right. Bye.’

I hung up.

 

*

 

Thursday night, just a day before the weekend and the promise of more sleep that, naturally, would never come, because sleep: sleep never comes. I was sitting at the edge of my bed on my phone, scrolling through my depressing X feed, willing myself to get up and go to the supermarket to get some dinner.

The doorbell went. I sighed and rose, went past my sofa into the hallway and picked up the receiver to the buzzer.

‘Hello.’

‘Me again.’

‘Who’s that, sorry?’

‘You.’

‘What?’

‘Just let me up.’

I shook my head and put the receiver back. My finger hovered over the buzzer button that unlocked the main door four storeys down. Then I shook my head a little, thought better of it, went through my bedroom to the balcony doors and looked out again over the side.

Standing directly below me on the street was me again, his face again turned up towards me, a cigarette hanging from his mouth, a light blue denim jacket on and brown jeans, black trainers, all the clothes I had on this very moment. I frowned. He disappeared from eyesight and behind me I heard the buzzer go again.

I didn’t pick up the receiver again after I went back to the hallway - I just pressed the buzzer and heard through the little box that someone had opened the main door to the building.

I opened up the door to my flat and waited in the hallway, taking my hands out of my pockets, just in case.

It was me, all right. He - I? - had the same clothes on, the same mousy-brown hair, the same bump on his nose from when I’d been headbutted at the age of fourteen and had my nose broken and never gone to the hospital for it, the same mole on his left cheek that grew little hairs when I got lazy and didn’t shave for a few days, the same dry skin on his forehead and the same awkward gait.

He came in through the door and stood facing me without saying anything. I frowned, and he frowned, mirroring my face. I raised my right hand, and he raised his right. I took a step back and he did too. I took another and he took another, and then another, and he took another and bumped into the door.

I shuffled left into my bedroom and he shuffled right into the hallway wall, and, peering round the door, I saw his hand raise and grip an imaginary doorknob as mine gripped the actual doorknob to my bedroom door and closed it softly.

 

*

 

My housemate had been away now for nearly five months, but was still paying rent, so I had free run of the place and his bedroom was empty. My doppelgänger was now staying in his room.

He never said much - occasionally he asked for food, and sometimes a hug, both of which I gave him. Recently, he’d started cooking for himself. He didn’t seem to have a job - at least, I never heard or saw him doing anything during the days except sitting at the desk in my housemate’s bedroom and staring at the wall - but he was able to go shopping, so he had money from somewhere.

I’d once sent him out to meet my friends for a night on an evening where I’d felt too tired to go, and he’d happily complied. My friends hadn’t mentioned anything about it the day after, so presumably he’d done a good job. Strangely, the next day we both woke with a hangover.

It was Sunday evening and he was doing what he always did: staring at the wall, sitting at the desk. I was in my bedroom in bed, the laptop in front of me, rewatching the same YouTube clips of the same panel show I’d seen a hundred times before. I was too tired to do anything else, not that I had anything else to do.

I heard my doppelgänger go to the toilet, flush, wash his hands. I slithered under the covers and pulled down my trackies and boxers. I pulled up some pornography on my phone and set to work on myself. It was tough going, as tired as I was, and I didn’t really feel in the mood, but I’d heard it was a good way to help induce sleep - not that it had ever worked before.

There was a knock on the door. I jumped, dropped my phone and pulled up my trousers.

‘Yeah?’

My doppelgänger entered wordlessly. He looked at me a moment through the open door and, leaving it open, walked over the rug, took off his shirt, and slid into bed next to me.

‘What are you doing?’

His hand went down my stomach to my pelvis and tried to take down my trousers and boxers. I stopped him. He persisted. Eventually I relented.
He gripped my penis and before long I came over my chest. Then I rolled on to my side and his arms wrapped around my chest, and for the first time in a long time, I fell asleep.

 

*

 

When I woke, the sun was already up, glaring in through the curtains which I hadn’t closed the night before. I rolled over to check the time on my phone, and realised he was gone.

It was quarter to eight. I had fifteen minutes until my first meeting. I picked up a cigarette from the pack on the bedside table and rested my ashtray on my chest. I closed my eyes while I smoked and sought the red fireworks behind my eyelids, but in the bright summer morning light, I couldn’t find them.

 

From Germany, James Alston is a Berlin-based British writer. His works are published in several. He is currently working on his first sci-fi novel.