Unighted

By Jodie Vinson

When we both contracted the coronavirus in early March, my husband Marc and I slept like never before—ten, twelve, fourteen hours a night, our bodies overwhelmed with fatigue. The sleep was deep but the exhaustion was chronic; tidal waves of weariness would knock us off our feet mid-day. For months we swam through lethargic afternoons, our bodies weighty and minds in a fog, before collapsing into bed and sleeping for another twelve hours.

But after six months of post-viral fatigue, our energy slowly seeped back. And as if a switch had been flipped, Marc stopped sleeping. He’d stay awake until 5 am, sometimes grasping an hour or two of shuteye before beginning work at nine. This sort of sleep loss would be detrimental to anyone’s health, but our bodies were severely set back by the virus, and I wasn’t sure how we would heal.

My husband has not slept well for most of his life. The youngest of four children by several years, Marc describes isolated nights when, the only member of the household awake, he’d stuff a blanket under the crack of the door and flood his bedroom with light, staying up into early morning hours. A combination of his genetic make-up, hypersensitivity to stress and external factors such as blue light, keeps him—along with what the CDC estimates could be over 70 million Americans—awake.

During the first years that Marc and I shared a bed, our marriage struggled to keep pace with his circadian rhythms. We tried everything to coax him to sleep: from tea to melatonin, sleep doctors to sleep journals, songs, rituals, meditation, marijuana. Marc still begins his days bathed in the electric blue of a light lamp, meant to sync his body with the rising sun. He dons a pair of orange wrap-around shades to block the blue light at bedtime. I tell stories and sing songs late into the night; I get up early to make breakfast and ease him into the day.

On the worst nights, when the hours pile up between us and the waking world, I imagine my husband happily settled in Macondo, the fictional village Gabriel García Márquez describes in One Hundred Years of Solitude. A village plagued with communal insomnia.

The idea of insomnia as communicable disease is so ingenious that when it’s first mentioned in the novel it almost slips by as background. Perhaps this is the realism of the masterful magical realism for which García Márquez is known—the reader accepts that the Buendía children’s nanny, Visitación, has fled from a tribe inflicted with a plague of insomnia.

Soon the pestilence descends on the household. At its head, José Arcadio Buendía welcomes sleepless nights without fatigue. “If we don’t ever sleep again, so much the better,” he says, naively optimistic. “That way we can get more out of life.”

And at first, it doesn’t seem so bad. The joy of infectious insomnia is that, unlike real insomnia, the inflicted are not alone. The family walks around dreaming, in a state of “hallucinated lucidity.” Not only do they see images from their subconscious come to life, some, we are told, can see the dreams of others.

*

I text my sisters to complain of another lost night. Over the past twelve days Marc has managed only one night of sleep. The world record for sleep deprivation—held by a seventeen-year-old at a 1965 science fair—is eleven days. Others have survived eight to ten days with no sleep in surveilled experiments. The sleep-deprived subjects had difficulty with cognitive processes like concentration, perception, motivation. Such studies place people with my husband’s condition at higher risk for cardiovascular disease and stroke, even Alzheimer’s.

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the real terror of the insomnia plague reveals itself in memory loss—the sleepless can no longer remember the names for things. The Buendía family counters by affixing labels to every object: “table, chair, clock, door, wall, bed, pan.” And yet they are described as “living in a reality that was slipping away.”

My family has been sympathetic to our sleep problems in the past, but now their response is immediate, effusive with empathy. My younger sister offers the blend of pot she and her husband use to unwind before bed as they mull over whether to send their daughter to daycare. My older sister recommends a new podcast for our bedtime queue. She’s just moved her family to the Olympic Peninsula—the closest U.S. time zone to their home in India, which they abandoned in March before the country went on lockdown. Her husband finishes his remote work day at 2 am, often not bedding down until four in the morning.

Even without an upside-down work life, others complain of troubled sleep. One friend is kept up by anxiety over the virtual classes she teaches at a university, another over worry for her children’s diminished social lives. In the middle of the night, my mother agonizes over the decision to remove my grandmother from a nursing home to care for her at home.

I check in with a stranger with post-viral symptoms similar to my own, one of many who reached out in recognition after I first wrote about my illness. “The chest pains aren’t bothering so much but my sleep is so terrible,” he writes back at 12:10am, “I don’t get one wink of sleep unless I’m on some type of med…I feel like I’m gonna die…it’s like my body completely forgot how to sleep.”

By some estimates, Americans were already getting two hours less sleep each night than before the invention of the light bulb. Since then, the prevalence of blue light-emitting technologies that delay the release of melatonin in the body, and thus postpone sleep, has reached such a height that few bedrooms are without a TV; smart phones make common bedfellows.

In the current health crisis, these practices are only increasing. Endless exposure to screens during Zoom meetings and Google meet ups, in addition to “doomscrolling,” can suppress melatonin secretion. The lack of sunlight during quarantine also disrupts circadian rhythms. Add to these environmental disturbances the psychological stress related to disease, loss of income, loss of loved ones—and you have what some experts have declared an epidemic within a pandemic, and others “coronasomnia.”

Meanwhile, sleep researchers have documented a marked uptick in vivid dreams throughout the pandemic. Nightmares are common in crisis, either because the mind is more active at night, or the sleeper more likely to wake often and remember dreams dreamed.

During the early months of quarantine, my father dreams a mafia boss gives him a choice: stay home or lose a finger. He wakes up calling for my mother to help him decide which hand. My mom dreams of an unmasked crowd coming too close. As she tries to convince them to back up, she bites into a bun with steel wool inside.

One sister dreams herself into a tiny tree fort filled with people, and the other of hands that won’t stop touching her. My three-year-old nephew wakes from a dream in which he lives in California with a dog and “no coronavirus.” I dream I’m back at the coworking space where I work, only to see coworkers seated hip to hip. Night after night, I wake myself up screaming at them to go home.

My husband and I are no longer alone in our restless bed.

*

If you visited the village of Macondo at that time, in the time of the insomnia plague, you would ring bells to warn the self-quarantined inhabitants to keep a social distance—you were a “sleeper.” Despite precautions, the disease spreads from the Buendía home to the rest of the village by way of the candy animals made in the house. Villagers suck down “delicious little green roosters of insomnia, the exquisite pink fish of insomnia, and the tender yellow ponies of insomnia,” and now the whole town is awake.

In this new reality, in which no one seems to be sleeping, I pass on to family, friends and strangers the rituals, routines, sleep meds, light sequences and meditation apps from our checkered nights. But while it’s important to mediate environmental stressors, I know by now that there is no fix-all antidote to soothe what lies at the existential heart of a wakeful night. Sometimes, I simply tell them that I, too, was awake at three o’clock this morning.  

In those timeless hours between midnight and dawn, between backrubs and stories and songs, I often fall back on a sleep ritual conjured during the early years and desperate nights of our marriage, when my husband’s sleep was a delicate, elusive thing that exacted the gentle, tender tenacity of an infinitely patient parent.

Sitting propped against pillows, cradling his dark heavy head, I begin, in a sort of sing-song voice, to list off everyone I can think of in our lives, everyone who loves him. As his eyes close, I cull candidates from both sides of the family tree, mining my sluggish brain for another obscure friend, pulling people from different cities and eras of life into a lulling cadence reminding my husband that he is loved, loved well, from many sides, from afar.

The coronavirus has, in myriad ways, cut us off from each other: distancing the healthy from the vulnerable, pitting the masked against the reckless, revealing economic disparities and deepening political divides. At night, when these distances grow dark and unfathomable, this isolation can feel like falling into an endless void, a sensation antithetical to sleep, which wants one to be grounded, bonded, held.

Yet the irony of insomnia is that there is always someone else awake. Collective isolation is the paradox of a pandemic. By tracing its destructive route through the global marketplace, tearing along trade routes and following flight paths, spreading through airports, apartments, churches, nursing homes, summer camps and schools, by obliterating our everyday and plaguing our nights, this communicable disease has also revealed the ways we are all intimately, irrevocably connected.

As I recite our list of loved ones, I watch Marc follow my voice to Boston where it finds his parents snug in their renovated condo, to the Olympic Peninsula where our niece and nephews sleep, ranging back to my sister in Minneapolis and a friend in Switzerland, another, in Saudi Arabia, and to my grandmother in Iowa, weaving a net of interconnectivity around the globe, our bedroom suspended but held at its center.

His breath evens, deepens; he gradually drifts off.

Alone in the night, I think again of Macondo. The village is not cured until a mysterious visitor arrives, ringing the bells of a sleeper and carrying a flask containing a healing drink of “gentle color.” Melquíades is an old friend, but at this point the plague is so far gone that José Arcadio Buendía cannot remember him. The visitor recognizes this void in memory as not the “irremediable forgetfulness of the heart,” but something “more cruel and irrevocable…the forgetfulness of death.”

Melquíades should know—he has just come back from being dead, a state which did not agree with him because “he could not bear the solitude.”

For a few minutes, I watch the steady rise and fall of Marc’s chest. Then I reach for my phone, shielding the screen’s sudden light with my palm as I locate the message from the sleepless stranger. “If it helps at all,” I write back, “you are not alone.” And slip into sleep beside him.

—

About Jodie Noel Vinson

Vinson holds an MFA in nonfiction creative writing from Emerson College. Her essays and reviews have been published in The New York Times, Harvard Review, Literary Hub, Agni, The Rumpus, Ploughshares, Creative Non-Fiction, Nowhere magazine and Electric Literature, among other places. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where she is writing a book about insomnia.