REGIONAL SLEEP
What a strange tune the dial of night is turned to.
Beneath the wind that whips through my window is a larger sound, a low, insistent chorus of trilling whispers that throbs like a pulse-beam in and out of my hearing. If this were the country I'd know it to be crickets or peep-frogs, but this is Brooklyn, so I have to assume its source is sickly and artificial. Some great asthmatic air conditioner unit wheezing from a factory rooftop, some gigantic engine shorn of gears, spinning idly out like an old man trying to make sense of his missing teeth. Or perhaps (and this is the best part) its cause is something darker, more looming and subversive. For all I know, an alien invasion is underway, and this is their mind-conditioning ray making its sweep. I am one of the few left awake to hear it. Most of my neighbors have already lapsed into a numbed and mildly troubled sleep, their dreams spilling into regions of white noise and emptiness as their cerebral cortexes are busily reknit. A lurid scenario, yes, but such over-saturated color schemes seem to fit best this era where, as all the big fiber-optic conglomerates are constantly reminding us, "anything is possible." I for one am shocked at myself that I don't throw on sneakers and shirt right now and run out into the streets, driven by an obsessive curiosity: Just where the hell is that sound coming from? Maybe it was all those air-raid warning drills I went through as a kid, my ears shrieking with mechanized hysteria. You come to accept that the sky is filled with invisible bombers, that the impossible is just another steady constant. So instead of maniacally searching, I shrug and switch on the TV, get ready for sleep, for my own dreams to succumb to a gnawing chorus of white noise. Perhaps the night is inventing for itself a new kind of dark music. Perhaps the wind is being retrained. Perhaps, if I only listened, I could learn something from it. I don't care if this mystery has an answer. Hang up. Refrain.