Nothing by Blake Butler Read Free Book Online Page A

brainwash, mind-erasers, tem-tems, mommy’s big helper, vitamin T, big T, TZ, and others.” 127 This for each goes on and on, language bifurcating around the object. In each word lurk several dozen; from each pill spring more pills to observe, and more pills manufactured in competition, begging which is best to suit your head.
    In 1987, we get the Sleep Number bed, allowing the consumer to choose a setting between 0 and 100, as fits one’s comfort; eventually, consumers will issue complaints about how the air pockets in the Sleep Number mattresses grow mold. Sleep deprivation procedures are used by David Koresh in his Branch Davidian compound, and later, from the other end, by the CIA against the compound from the outside in an attempt to force its inhabitants to surrender. Each year computers keep getting smaller, smarter. They are taught to talk in human speech. Meanwhile TVs grow in the reverse direction, though also aimed at more correctly replicating the things we see, sized as we are, or even larger. Our atmospheric volume stays the same. Rats in labs are subjected to sleep deprivation and grow lesions and bacterial colonies in their flesh, losing weight despite increased eating; later the rats die. The most common sleep position is found to be fetal. How one sleeps is said to reflect one’s personality, mirror one’s fate. Every minute there are more ideas, theories, and classification systems of the intricacies of waking and of sleeping, and therefore of sleep trouble, polysomnias, meta-thoughts, than ever. Photographs of night continue to exist during the day.
    The cities sprawl. In 1989, the Guinness record for world’s longest movie is an eighty-five-hour-long creation titled The Cure for Insomnia , which consists almost entirely of a guy reading his 4,080-page poem of the same name, occasionally cut with heavy metal and clips from porn. The next year, Adobe Photoshop 1.0 is released into the public, popularizing direct manipulation of the image. In 1992, we get memory foam , which learns to mold itself around our bodies. “I am tired” becomes so common a phrase it’s no longer even worth admitting.
    In 1995, the direct cost of insomnia in the U.S. for medications and health care services is estimated at $13.96 billion. 128 That same year the fourteen members of the Order of the Solar Temple doomsday group are found dead in a forest in the French Alps, arranged in a star formation, most with sleep drugs in their blood. A year earlier, another forty-eight of the same group had been found dead, many in a mirror-lined underground chapel, arranged into a circle and full of sleep drugs, with plastic bags around their heads to protect against the plague they believed was coming for all humans at their exit. Deleuze throws himself out of a window.
    By the end of the twentieth century, reports say sleep time in Americans over the past hundred years has decreased by 20 percent. Reports show that the errors caused by our lost sleep result in more than 110,000 injuries and 5,000 fatalities every year, not to mention incidents such as Chernobyl, the Challenger , the Exxon Valdez —the damage leaking out into air and water, back into our blood. Sleep loss is shown to cause obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, anxiety, depression, and alcoholism. The queen-sized mattress at last passes the twin as the most popular American size of bed. Lack of sleep will soon be linked to weight gain. We map the human genome.
    Days continue to act within the length of days. We get Google, YouTube, Myspace, Facebook. On each of these sites, and many like them, new data is added by the second by the bit, with multibillion users awake and online at any time. Pictures of people’s heads appear on further websites, aggregated. We have all these passwords to remember, and questions to answer to retrieve the passwords, and codes written to try to trick the passwords from our heads. Spam mail accrues in folders often unaccounted,