He lay still and stared. After several minutes, he remembered to blink.

“Nighttime is torture,” he thought. “Nothing but black empty loneliness in the sky, in my bed, in my life.” His dry eyes burned as he closed them. After a while, they moistened and the pain melted away. He opened them and stared again.

He spent a lot of time laying in bed, staring out his window. The Arizona sky was clear enough most nights that he could see the stars. He would stare until they became crosses on his blurred eyelids, plus signs and Xes staring back at him. Slowly he would tire, slowly his thoughts would drift through the dull ache of cold next to him.

Actually, it wasn’t cold. It was hot. Some emotion felt cold next to him in bed. Something warm needed to be there, someone he loved and who loved him. Then he could drape an arm over the warm body there and drift to sleep. Instead, he stared out the window and forgot to blink.

He started awake. He must have dozed off for a short time, because the shocking images of his dreams had shocked him awake again. Dreams were the demons of the torturous night, taunting him with his unattained dreams and pricking him with guilty pains. He searched for some thought to distract him from the images.

Once he’d been unable to sleep and looked up some dirty pictures online. They were easy to find, totally free, and they burned guilt into the past years of his life. Now, his dreams were torrid hybrids of reality and the putrid memories. His imagination was powerful. When sleep unleashed it, it tortured him with new images in old poses. He hated the guilty reminder of his earlier weakness. He hated it more when the images pleased his darker side.

He turned over and stared at the blackness. No stars to remind him that his eyes were open. No Xes reminding him of the rating of his mind. He tried to think about purity and goodness, but his imagination connected them to bad thoughts. He repeated the pattern for a few minutes, then he psychoanalyzed himself, then he dazed into insomniac nonthought.

He started awake again. He couldn’t remember the dream this time, but the clock’s red numbers told him he’d been asleep for at most 5 minutes. That was the most he’d slept in this bed in two days. His mind rebelled against complex thought, but he couldn’t help seeing he was stuck in a rut.

So many times, so many years of nonsleep like this, and he never mastered falling asleep. He had been successful at falling asleep, but he could never remember how he’d done it the last time or any previous time. It was always a miraculous accomplishment, a rediscovery of the properties of the wheel. And it was always lost with the memories of the few moments just before sleep.

Mornings were the opposite. Sleep poured itself upon him in a thick mass that bound him to the bed. His body involuntarily accomplished amazing feats of dexterity and strength to turn off his alarm clock before his mind awoke. People would tell him later about the tricks and screaming that failed to wake him. Alarm clocks would seem never to have gone off. Twice, he’d awoken to warm, moist blankets and been told that someone had dumped icy water on him to no avail.

It was probably some diagnosable sleep disorder, but who had money for doctors? All he could do was find afternoon and evening jobs and search for ways to fill the endless hours of night that descended on him like caffeine clouds, leaving him mentally incapacitated but incapable of sleep.

He checked the clock again. 3:14. He imagined that it was 15.9 seconds past, laughed inwardly at his own geekyness, and did some math. He’d gone to bed just before 10. That means he’d been awake for nearly 5 and a half hours, and slept no more than 5 minutes at a time.

For the second night in a row, he was too tired to cry. An ache in his chest reminded him of the cold ache next to him, and he started his nightly routine over. “Please, exhaustion, take me away from this!”

The stars out the window all looked like crosses and Xes and plus signs. He closed his eyes and waited as the burn subsided. He’d forgotten to blink again.

He lay still and stared.