There was very little sympathy for Calvin when his insomnia started. Normally, he didn’t share personal and pointless facts about his life, but as more nights passed without sleep, he found the complaints leaking out of him to whoever would hear it. His coworkers were not sympathetic. In their eyes, it was karmic retribution for his unholy approach to work.
When he called his parents, they sounded relieved. Trouble sleeping was a “normal” problem. If anything, they were relieved. They told him not to drink caffeine too late, and to avoid looking at screens. Calvin knew all of this, he’d read it in desperate late night internet searches, hoping that he could find something that would work. His hands tightened around fistful of his hair, pulling until he felt several strands begin to pull away at the root.
It didn’t add up. If sleep were as simple as a mathematic equation, he would have solved it. Something crucial was missing.
It was the fourth day without sleep. If he had slept, it had been a mere spray of water while he was dying of thirst in the dirt. At that point, the differences between sleep and his waking reality began to diminish. Each space was a shadowy, shifting mess that he struggled to comprehend.
His alarm was hardly the borderline between sleep and consciousness that it had once been. Now it was a singular floating point, a buoy, bobbing in a vast space. Harder to tell what it marked when he was adrift in the same limbo.
Then he began noticing gaps in his day. One moment, he was staring at himself in the mirror while brushing his teeth, and the next he was staring into the dull light of his computer at work. There would be a moment of panic, his eyes looking down, worried he would have driven all the way to the office in his underwear. If he had, would it still be reality or would that have passed some threshold of absurdity meaning that he had to be dreaming?
He was fully clothed, but try as he might, he could not remember his morning commute. When he tried to focus on it, to pull out some foggy details of traffic, or whether he had locked his door, he found that his mind simply went blank. When he decided to not waste any more time on this endeavor, he realized that he had been staring at the same document for most of the day. Another gap. It was lucky that he had been working ahead on all those late nights. Now, he was all but useless at work.
He decided that it would eventually pass. No reason to make it into a bigger issue than it was. But as often happens when things are pushed to some forgotten corner, rot began to spread, and his life festered.
His footfalls on the pavement outside the office were slow and heavy. He had chosen to stay late again, trying to make up the work he should have been doing during the day. He’d stayed, knowing that these extra hours would undoubtedly affect his productivity the next day.
The headache that had become another fixture of his daily aches and pains had lost some of its sharpness. It was just a dull pounding in his temples, as his eyes struggled to stay open. They burned when he stared into the screen, they burned when he forced himself to look away, everything in the office appearing fuzzy. He knew he had to get home, and at least try to sleep. Perhaps, if he were able to get some sleep, he would call in sick the next day.
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He was on his way home, the car gliding through the velvet night. It was the best part of staying late at the office. The roads were almost completely empty, and he was free to drive home, his mind unbothered with sharing the road.
Tonight felt different. The empty streets no longer gave him a sense of peace. The loneliness of the road was not simply being enjoyed by Calvin. It felt like the night itself had become aware of Calvin. That he was out so late, alone, and not where he was supposed to be.
His eyes continued to dart between his mirrors, casting looks over his shoulders into his blind spots. Surely, he was missing something. It was out there in the shadows, this entity that was causing his fear. Yet his eyes continued to see nothing, and he thought to himself that this wave of paranoia was just the latest symptom of his sleep starved mind.
He drove beneath an overpass, flipping his blinker on for a moment as he drifted into the left turn lane. Perhaps once he was on the highway, he could drive fast enough to put himself at ease again. His eyes widened as another car seemed to appear in front of him. He slammed the brakes and held his horn.
The idiot didn’t even have his headlights on, and he’d almost gotten rear ended for his stupidity. He held the horn down longer than he had intended to, as he felt his anger boiling, the steam released in that loud horn ringing into the quiet night.
It was impossible to see through the car’s back window, but as far as he could see, the driver did not appear to have reacted at all. This only fed Calvin’s anger. When the light turned green, the driver in front of him stayed put. Calvin’s hand flew to the horn again. He even looked behind him as if looking for confirmation that what he was seeing was real. Of course, they were the only two at the light. The driver lingered a moment longer.
That singular moment was enough to coalesce his anger around this light blue sedan, the bumper slightly crooked, no doubt from a lifetime of reckless driving. The two cars moved through the intersection, Calvin staying within a foot of the car in front. He wasn’t sure what he was hoping to accomplish by doing this. But as the car in front of him sped up the ramp toward the highway above, he felt determined to see this through.
As both cars made their way onto the highway, the car in front had gotten a little further ahead, but soon enough, Calvin had caught up. He kept his car a breath away matching the changing lanes, and the increase in speed. He felt himself smile. The driver tried to shake him off, swerving from one lane to the other, a rabbit dashing in a serpentine pattern to try to throw off the hawk that was getting closer.
After one of these little maneuvers, the driver tried to hit their brakes, and get behind Calvin, but he was ready. He hadn’t felt this alive since his insomnia started. This little game he was playing, pushing the driver into increasingly dangerous attempts at evading him.
Then the driver seemed to give up. Calvin could see it in the movements. The way the driver moved to the right lane, and kept his speed consistent, no matter how close behind Calvin got. His prey had given up. And still that wasn’t enough. Calvin swerved to the left, matching the cars speed, and positioning himself next to the other car. When he was even with it, he turned to the side and was able to see the driver for the first time.
The man looked to be in his seventies. The look of fear in his eyes was distinctive. Calvin saw in that look, a man that had been pushed to the edge, and was ready to accept his fate. It was as he began to turn the wheel to the right, ready to ram this old man clean off the road when he felt a rush to his head. It was like the moment before waking from a dream. He took stock of what he was about to do, and that malice that had been all consuming a moment before evaporated.
An exit came up, and the old man swerved hard to take it. Calvin continued onward. His heart was pounding, his hands gripping the wheel tight to prevent them from shaking. When he got home, he found that he was still breathing heavily as if he had run home. He laid down in bed, ready to lie there, going over the incidents of the evening in his head for the few hours that remained until dawn. He’d only just laid down when he passed out. It was the best sleep he’d ever had.