Sleep. There could never be enough to sate this ever present hangover of exhaustion. A veneer of slowness coats every word from my mouth, becoming ever so slightly more obvious after each day, like a white plastic home security console slowly yellowing year after unused year. Marines in boot camp get more time horizontal than this.
But even when sleep does come, it conceals jagged reefs of interruption. The call to prayer from the Aya Sophia and the Blue Mosque in Istanbul involves what I can only imagine to be a wall of Marshall stacks that would cause Angus Young to pause his school boy seizure and whimper at the sheer power. First call begins at 3:30.
Upon move in day two weeks ago, each and every one of my new brothers in arms announced he was either an experienced somnambulist or an avid sleep talker. I am the only one not yet possessed.
On the first night I was awakened between three and six times to either rambling monologues or nonsensical conversation between two or more of the inhabitants. While entertaining for the first few nights, sleep became interrupted more and more frequently, and events that could revive the Paranormal Activity franchise accompanied them. An individual scrambled out of bed to hold the walls up, because “Guys the walls are falling, we have to get out.” Other members of the dig team were mentioned in the midnight conversations, often in disturbingly ambiguous contexts. The final straw occurred when I awoke to my room-mate looming over me, arms extended in what would normally be a C- impression of Frankenstein’s monster, grumbling my name and slowly descending towards what I assumed was my neck. Several obscenities and some brief Brazilian Jiu Jitsu ensued, and the sinister somnambulist slunk back to his lair. I switched to a top bunk the next morning.
I am currently writing this in the back of a bus while passing through the city of Alanya, crammed with my exhausted friends like so many cheap sardines, me next to the room-mate who may harbor a sub-conscious desire to go full zombie and eat my brains. He is asleep at the moment, for better or worse. I am desperately wracking my brain for the folder labeled “Freud.” It probably got buried somewhere.
As I spell check my eyelids become magnets, ready to snap shut the moment the toothpicks are removed.
