Brave in Bed
Brecken Hancock | Tolka Issue Two, August 2024
I take my phone to bed – my husband on one side, my cell on the other.
I face my cell.
*
It starts with a skim of scalp.
The cadaver of a Texan murderer who died of lethal injection was encased and frozen in gelatine, then ground down on the axial plane, one millimetre at a time.
Photographs of his 1,871 cryosections compile like leaves of a book; a stack of rectos; a secret turf of nerves (stubs of axons and dendritic miles); atrial chambers; a bog of colon; fat; furls of brain; and tendons, imprecisely milled, smeared across the surfaces.
*
He wasn’t sliced.
In a university lab in Denver, a motorised, rotating disk of sandpaper scoured him away, turning him to frozen, cadaveric dust.
*
Each milling of his corpse revealed an aerial view of viscera – a slab of anatomical features – as, stratum by stratum, his head came open and utter darkness was amputated into light.
They shot photos of him, the remainder of him, of it, the rock-hard and shiny top of a stump that had once housed an appetite and an imagination.
*
I’m not moralising; I love looking.
These same layers of meat stack to make me.
*
He was a murderer.
To eliminate a witness during a burglary, he repeatedly stabbed a man and then shot the same man three times.
He was convicted and sentenced in Texas, where they put some kinds of criminals to sleep.
He ordered cheeseburgers for his last meal and then refused to eat.
*
FINAL MEAL REQUESTS
Ex. 63
Last Name Jernigan
First Name Joseph
Date 08/05/1993
Final-meal request* Two cheeseburgers, French fries, tossed salad with Thousand Island dressing and iced tea (refused last meal).
* The final meal requested may not reflect the actual final meal served.
*
The prison chaplain pressured him to donate his body to science. But he never knew that he’d be polished down, head to toe, for me to look at.
*
What am I looking at?
A body is atoms, a branching nothingness.
I flip through his leaves.
Where was he in here, in these pieces?
You know the he I’m talking about.
*
Sometimes I feel absolute, but not tonight.
Lying in bed, I release Joseph Paul Jernigan, the sixty-five gigabytes of his data, and the blue light of my phone back to the nightstand.
Dark tars the room.
Our humidifier pitches white noise over the bed and my accumulated slices of eyeball stare toward the ceiling.
Skin chafes against a snag in the cotton comforter.
*
It’s the quality of the air.
I can’t feel it but I can feel it, touching me.
Shadows against the plaster but – from here to there – air. Some of it along my tongue and down my throat, packing me thick and wide and deep.
*
Consciousness has a wattage, but who controls the switch?
Who dims me down through ombré darkness, the substrative depths?
*
We need better linens.
IKEA’s thread count is bullshit.
*
Through earbuds, I hear Tara Brach’s meditation podcast.
Relax right down to the root of the tongue, notice how the mouth might fill with sensation: tongue, gums, teeth, lips.
To meditate is to apply attention to breath and body and one second of this activates a granular discomfort.
Sense the throat filling the neck.
I am atoms, a surge of overlapping dots.
Aware of the legs, the length and volume, so you’re feeling from the inside out, right down to the feet, feeling the pressure, the warmth, the temperature, the aliveness inside the feet.
What is the body if not a stump of wet dust awakened temporarily and inexplicably into life?
Widening the attention, so you can feel sensations throughout the body, simultaneously.
*
My skull disturbs a pillow.
A micron slice of scalp crawls at the follicle.
Every epidermal electron strikes the sheets.
I can’t sleep.
*
I wish someone would tell me what sleep is or how to achieve it.
Every night I come to this bed like someone thirsty who’s gone to the sink.
*
I want to show up here and drink, ingest the molecules of the room, knit the ingredients of darkness into my darkness, quench what’s tired in my cells, and come away sated.
But the ritual is more spell than transaction.
There’s no material here to slake exhaustion – I’ve slid my spent body down into blackness only to be stormed by the spiny debris of consciousness, the mind’s assault of the mind.
Nerves snarl; the heart beats at the thorax from beneath.
One by one the hours dissolve, and I feel their loss as grief.
*
I spend the night in the amplified consciousness of a fool.
Google informs me that cells in the human body die and are replaced at varying rates – it takes six days to get a new cervix, two months to get a new trachea, ten years to get a new skeleton. Neurons – the cells that make up the nervous system, spinal column and brain – don’t die, but all of the atoms in the human body, including those that constitute neurological cells, turn over.
The top thirty layers of the epidermis are expired cells that slough off and become household dust.
I touch my husband’s naked back, there, where he’s already dead.
*
Sometimes my husband wears pyjamas, but tonight his skin lies long beside me.
I put my forehead against his spine and smell laundry detergent and farts venting up from under the sheets.
A song creeps into my head and spirals on repeat – a mechanical, nasal melody from a computer game I played in my twenties: I love you warm baby, warm baby, I love you.
I want to wake him for sex, but he has an early meeting.
In protecting his sleep, I feel virtuous and heroic – he should thank me.
Maybe I’ll wake him for that.
*
I don’t wear pyjamas because I’m not ten years old.
*
I turn to Maria Konnikova’s series of articles on sleep in the New Yorker.
Here’s what’s supposed to happen when you fall asleep.
Your body temperature falls, even as your feet and hands warm up . . . circadian clocks throughout your body synchronize.
Melatonin courses through your system – that tells your brain that it’s time to quiet down.
Your blood pressure falls and your heart rate slows.
Your breathing evens out.
You drift off.
*
In our waking lives, my husband and I divide administrative and household labour.
He cooks and decides where things go in the shed.
I list shit on Kijiji and launder the piles of textiles that must advance from hamper to basement to closet every Saturday.
I chose the tog of this duvet; I’m too hot and have only myself to blame.
*
With the largest toe on my right foot, I pin a bit of gravel to the mattress and drive it, one millimetre at a time, over the sheet.
*
I watch the ghost of a window behind curtains, a wedge of orange light under the door, red minutes counting themselves to morning.
My breasts run across my ribs like raw egg.
I recline in a pool of thighs.
*
Netflix, too, is on my phone.
Over the edge of the bed, on dim, I watch billionaires gesture at earth they gutted with dynamite so their homes would look in tune with the landscape.
Caroline Quentin slumps back across a white duvet in cave-like guest quarters: I love this bedroom, this so secrety bedroom.
The designer and owner of the home, Bjarne Mastenbroek, laughs: That’s why architecture’s not so important; it’s the bed linen.
*
Sleep’s realities factor little in our cultural imagination: even television bedrooms set in Florida swell with winter duvets as heavy as weighted sensory blankets.
I guess we’re all just trying to get cosy.
*
And I’m certain sleep is something I could achieve if only I were elsewhere.
In this way, sleep’s like writing – in either case, it’s the room’s fault I’m not relaxed or productive.
*
Two cats are killing each other for territory in the street.
They scream like babies with bad dreams.
*
I get up to go pee.
We have a couple of kids asleep in other rooms, two little cuts I bleed through.
I slip past their closed doors, trying not to wake them.
The bathroom window leaks so much streetlight it could be day and, whatever’s happening out there, the world wants to fall asleep and forget it.
My phone vibrates; Dad, Egypt Standard Time, says things are going well on his cruise.
*
I’m on the cold seat past the point of pissing to finish Alison Gopnik’s chapter on waking consciousness and sight.
Almost all studies of adult consciousness involve focused attention and a narrowly defined task – when we attend to something it’s as if we shine a beam of light on it that makes all its details more vivid.
The book glows up off my palm and, behind my eyes, the city of lucidity remains lit.
*
Babies’ consciousness is less like a spotlight and more like a lantern – a vivid panoramic illumination of the everyday – which adults sometimes experience in meditation, in mania, or when falling in love.
The mania of insomnia explodes surfaces into particulars – I love how this bathroom provides evidence of my existence everywhere: I chose the quartz, walnut, chrome and tile.
The Zen master Shunryu Suzuki called lantern consciousness ‘beginner’s mind’, the mind as it is uncontaminated by expertise.
I’m reminded of my kids, just through that wall, dreaming their big, naïve dreams.
*
Now I’m thumbing through photos of the kids because nostalgia is the most potent form of love.
*
I hate being awake while my family sleeps.
All day, all I want is some quiet to myself.
But at night, in the silence of the house, I feel nuts.
I’m alive and infused with consciousness and I could do anything to them.
And what’s coming is coming.
*
Eventually I set down my phone and pull up my panties.
I drink from the faucet, then look out from my head into the mirror.
Time is hard to observe as it’s passing, but then it’s there, obvious, all at once.
Fuck, my face.
Anatomists refer to eye sockets as orbits, the emptiness in the skull that holds planets.
Space has weight, a shape and a power.
There’s gravity beneath my eyes.
*
This story of sleep emerges from lack.
Shivering in my underwear, I close my eyes against myself: if consciousness so fundamentally enlists sight, shouldn’t falling asleep be this easy?
But, no; there’s an underside to seeing.
In 1995, an issue of my dad’s Scientific American arrived at our door containing a picture encoded in a field of overlapping dots.
You can still find it, and the description of how to decode it, on the internet.
*
• •
Just cross your eyes until the two black dots above this image become four.
Then, through luck or will, make the two central dots of your hallucination coalesce, until only three spots remain.
Take an aspirin.
Focus on the middle dot.
When it is clear and unmoving, slowly bring your eyes down over the picture.
*
*
Maybe sleep demands a wall-eyed consciousness.
To ‘look’ – not at but through.
To fall through.
*
When I come back to bed, he’s on my side.
I growl.
In sleep, he’s single: absence from our bed is my erasure.
The mattress feels hot to the touch and I shove him over with both palms.
There’s no one to talk to: his back curves away from me.
Sleep is sovereignty.
*
Ever since giving birth to the kids, one or another of my hips or shoulders or limbs will go numb.
I try the foetal position on my right.
I try savasana, then a pillow between my knees on my left.
I splay on my stomach, then flip to the other side.
*
Also, Kathy really pissed me off this weekend.
I compose scripts for the next time I see her.
Choke on the mixed results of your own choices.
Your dog is the only audience for your stories.
Look at your panty line, you asshole, and despair.
*
It’s a demonstrable fact that lying quietly in a dark room dials up the pain metre.
There’s a questionnaire in my inbox, forwarded by a friend with sleep apnoea.
How much sleep did you receive last night?
How often have you lain awake because of pain?
On the diagram, shade in any painful areas.
Put an X where you hurt the most.
*
Some people are born with an inability to feel pain.
For those with congenital analgesia, sensation is normal except for temperature – for example, they can register the pressure but not the warmth in touch.
They often die as children after failing to report harm or illness: fatal burns, for instance, are common.
I’ve also heard that some people don’t get anxious or depressed.
But I don’t think it’s life-threatening.
*
Every night I come to this bed like someone thirsty who’s gone to the sink and then can’t remember what brought her there.
I turn toward my cell.
*
Those who sleep less than eight hours a night die sooner.
Children need thirteen hours a night to be happy.
Sleep less, live longer.
Infants who die suddenly do so in their sleep.
Sleeping more than nine hours can have some pretty scary consequences.
Sleep disorders have major consequences.
Those who sleep less than four hours will suffer consequences.
Cardiovascular disease, obesity, depression, diabetes and even dementia can develop.
Twenty-one per cent of fatal car accidents are caused by a sleepy driver.
Regular oversleeping means a forty-four per cent increased risk of death.
You won’t believe the amount of sleep that could kill you.
*
Waiting to die must awaken beginner’s mind – that childlike state of consciousness uncontaminated by expertise.
I mean, what are we less accomplished at than death?
*
We imagine sleep to be an incubating form of death, and we want to die in our sleep as though the transition were trivial, from one oblivion to another.
But sleep and death are related only from the vantage of consciousness: to the conscious mind, any loss of control is cessation.
*
Unless you’re on death row.
Then, I can only assume, any conflation of sleep with death would reveal itself to be absurd.
*
That night, the atoms in the prison’s bars exchanged places with those in the air and some became flesh and some peeled away.
And in the panoramic illumination, I think he could see it.
*
Our bodies are made to feel pain and it’s coming.
*
The prison chaplain convinced him to give his flesh to science, but he didn’t know that he’d be sanded down, one millimetre at a time, for me to look at.
What am I looking at?
Tissue and blood and what looks like flattened mushrooms and bits of sky and emptiness where he was and what can never be photographed again.
*
To know the body, we defile its darkness.
To look – at it, through it – we open it, admit space and light.
*
*
Joseph Paul Jernigan, your hamburgers are ready.
*
It turns out insomniacs sleep more than they think they do – misjudging how long it takes to fall asleep and how often waking occurs throughout the night.
They can confuse dreams with waking conscious thought.
*
We mistake being asleep for being awake.
Notes
• The National Library of Medicine describes its Visible Human Project as such: ‘[The Project] has created publicly available, complete, anatomically detailed, three-dimensional representations of a human male body and a human female body. Specifically, the Visible Human Project provides a public- domain library of cross-sectional cryosection, CT and MRI images obtained from one male cadaver and one female cadaver.The Visible Man data set was publicly released in 1994 and the Visible Woman in 1995.’
• David Brown’s article ‘The Visible Human Project: A Slice of Life’ (Washington Post, 13 January 1999) provided descriptions that were influential to ideas throughout: ‘All of the body’s functions arise from parts that are packed solid and working in total darkness. It’s a revelation no less astonishing for being obvious. People who want to work inside this universe are faced with an ironic truth. They must violate the body’s natural order before they can understand or repair it. The first task of the anatomist and the surgeon is to create space and admit light.’
• Joseph Paul Jernigan’s final meal request, along with the final meal requests of other death-row inmates, was originally posted on the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s website. While this information has since been taken down, it was archived on 2 December 2003 at the Internet Archive: Wayback Machine. The data’s donor was Alexa Crawls, the AI developed by Amazon.
• Part of the line ‘along my tongue and down my throat, packing me thick and wide and deep’ is plagiarised from Souvankham Thammavongsa’s poem ‘Sea’ (Light, Pedlar Press, 2013). Lines 11–14 read: ‘Then pack your lungs thick and wide and deep / with all of this / and go out there, there, where you think / you belong’.
• Tara Brach’s website offers many free, guided meditations, including the one quoted in this piece.
• Lines enumerating the turnover rate of the body’s cells and atoms were inspired by an interview with neuroscientist David Eagleman conducted by Lulu Miller for the podcast Invisibilia (‘The Personality Myth’ 24 June 2016). A Google search provided many additional details, most importantly from scientists Ron Milo and Rob Phillips’ website Cell Biology by the Numbers, ‘How Quickly Do Different Cells in the Body Replace Themselves?’.
• Maria Konnikova’s description of the body’s process toward sleep is from her article ‘Why Can’t We Fall Asleep?’ (New Yorker, 7 July 2015).
• The reference to The World’s Most Extraordinary Homes features a snippet of conversation from Season 1 Episode 4, ‘Underground’ (Netflix).
• Alison Gopnik’s The Philosophical Baby (Picador, 2009) provided fruitful descriptions of consciousness, often leveraging sight as metaphor.
• Marguerite Holloway’s article ‘Secrets in Stereogram’ (Scientific American, January 1995) is still available through the magazine’s online archives. Copyright for the stereogram in Holloway’s article, however, is not available; the proxy included here is courtesy of Easy Stereogram Builder.
• The images illustrating aligned vergence and wall-eyed convergence are copies of those found within the Wikipedia entry for ‘Autostereogram’. Most of Wikipedia’s content, including these images, is available through Creative Commons: Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. However, the anonymous artist/author notes that these were adapted from images in Stephen M. Kosslyn and Daniel N. Osherson’s An Invitation to Cognitive Science (1995: page 65, figure 1.49).
• Most of the questions in the sleep questionnaire were drawn from a set of documents sent to me by a friend. However, the line ‘How much sleep did you receive last night?’ is from Nick Drnaso’s graphic novel Sabrina (Drawn & Quarterly, 2018).
• Image from the Visible Human Project courtesy of the United States National Library of Medicine.
• Suzanne Buffam’s A Pillow Book (Anansi, 2016) initially inspired this piece. Especially relevant is Buffam’s discussion of insomnia: ‘If an insomniac claims to drowse two or three fitful hours on her pillow, studies find, she has probably passed, in perfect peace, at least twice that time’ (p. 81). See also Andrea Peterson’s article ‘You May Be Getting More Sleep Than You Think’ (Wall Street Journal, 13 July 2015).
Brecken Hancock’s work has appeared in Hazlitt, Best American Experimental Writing and Best Canadian Poetry. Her first book, Broom Broom (Coach House, 2014), won the Trillium Book Award for Poetry.
‘Brave in Bed’ was first published in Issue Two of Tolka (November 2021). You can subscribe to Tolka for a year for €22.
