Anna
Foreign City Lit Up
Sleep is supposed to call when you have time to spare. For me, it comes climbing through my window instead, never mind that I live on the sixteenth floor or that the midday sun glares, booming “start working” in its own language. I tell myself it is wiser to shut the window. Sleep quirks an eyebrow and I go over anyway. My father grumpily compared me to a sloth when I poked holes in my schedule to sneak in sleep. I darted a glance sideways, sometimes exasperated but more often with a guilty grin. My mother shook her head and muttered about happily ever after and breaking sleeping spells and riding away. I put my face in my pillow and suggested that it was because Snow White and Sleeping Beauty have had a good long rest that their endings were perfect.
Did the Pea Princess not find bliss in a marriage that promised a proper pea-less mattress? Who is to say Rapunzel’s relief was in her escape from the witch, rather than from the constant sleep-disrupting yells from the bottom of the tower? I comb my hair into order, the mint in the toothpaste driving my eyes wide. Sleep speaks back from within the mirror and agrees that it is the fairest logic of them all.
Being able to fall asleep anywhere and anytime has always been one of my few talents. I used to doze unabashedly on the battered blue bench in the entrance hall of the railway station, schoolbag cushioning my body against the cold of its digging metal arms, waiting for the single decker bus to school. Older students shuffled with their noses in textbooks. Parents with small groggy children at each hand sprinted for the departing nanny van. White collar women and men swung hypnotic arcs with hurriedly bought bags of breakfast, in time with the click of the heel. The morning rituals passed me by.
It evolved into the habit to drowse and oversleep the brief ten minutes to my stop, cheek resting on the side of the minibus, when I got older. The driver ignored the beeps that warned us we were travelling—impossibly—at breakneck speed despite being in the middle of Central’s rush hour traffic. Views on either side of Garden Road flew past as we sped uphill, cheongsam-clad students walking towards the school entrance turned into a smear of blue through the window, the red brick building was left behind. I drifted off at my desk in the examination hall, no terror of pages flipping, pen tips scratching against paper and imperfect answers demanding to be double-triple-quadruple-checked and corrected. The air conditioner whirred, a boy cleared his throat, invigilators marched down the aisles. There was just the softest snore. A part of me suspects that even when an alien force sends an iconic skyscraper along the Victoria Harbour to crash down into the next, as it does in English films, I would have found inside a hollow of a perfect fit.
I sleep knowing the lights shine, there when I lie back, when my fingers brush against them in my morning stretch. In the humid heat of summer, the whiffs of the sea, neon signs in the distance, my sister’s chatter so near. As sure as sleep is ever within reach, hovering just at the window.
In all that certainty, I boarded the plane to London, backpack on the right shoulder and a constant shoved in its outside pocket where I can easily reach. We drove through a cityscape, almost homelike with its skyscrapers and jammed-pack roads. I napped, head miles up into the clouds. I measured the clock tower wrapped in scaffolding against the one at the Star Ferry Pier. I blinked a feeling of lead from my eyelids. Despite lacking the strikes Virginia Woolf wrote of, could it be seen from my dormitory? I waved my parents goodbye and strode into a briefing scarcely different from the ones that had shown me into primary school, secondary school, university—ushers at the door handing out welcoming packs, students striking up conversations, lulling voice of the crisply dressed figure at the front pressed shirt, Powerpoint behind him showing the white-on-red school logo we might begin to call our own. I was going to nod off.
That night I discovered the city of pickpockets had picked my pocket.
In the earliest days on my own, I crawled under the covers at an hour barely past dinner time back home. The blinds were down, though the sky beyond had been dark since before five o’clock. The sole window was locked. The chill knew its way through the slight slits. Snatches of conversation about visiting family and weekend plans stole in under the door from down the hall. One of my flat mates had their friends over. Things sharpen and crystalise when it is just you and your senses, inside three solid walls and one floor length panel of glass. Cold toes. Door slam. Cold nose. A low hum came alive when e it was the dead of night—you might think it the hum of silence, or still air. I lay flat on my back, eyes squeezed shut, not thinking about the foreign city lit up by foreign lights, only weariness calling for sleep.
With one hand, I strained to get a grasp of the news city’s rhythms, and from the other sleep slipped away. The first day, looking over my shoulder on a bus to Drury Lane, I caught a glimpse of the familiar figure ducking under Lambeth Bridge. The next, I was so certain it was hiding along the Victoria and District Lines: who else could that be but sleep, peeking from behind Temple Station? Stifling yawns, I took the steps up into Bush House two at a time for my new student ID. I bet a pound those footsteps shadowing mine, tiptoeing, teasing, terribly like my own, belonged to sleep. It is like not realising you neglected to mention you are leaving, until a presence taken for granted is missing. And you cannot tell if it is because the contact number has been forgotten or if someone is simply mad at you. I mapped the strange halls of my school, hoping I might find sleep in the dimness of the North Wing’s twisting stairs. I hunted behind the rows of bookshelves in the library, my eyes skipping over the soaring arches to the likely hiding spots under the studying tables. I called when the sun set mid-afternoon as it did in January. What was I to do without it?
Daunt Books. Flat Iron. Sir John Soane’s Museum. The Phantom of the Opera. That was the list I kept in an app. It went on and I added on, places I could spend most of an evening at, sights I could speed up time taking in. I typed in the Royal ballet. The evening’s actual show of Don Quixote opened at the Royal Opera House only a few tube stops away from where I lived. I pulled up instead a four-hour video of the men’s figure skating short program at the Pyeongchang Olympics, an event I had already seen, till it was no longer too early to call it a day. Tomorrow I would sleep in late, and those on the other side of my phone would awake to reply and teachers and classmates I barely knew would talk and maybe the Korean girl in the room next to mine would mean it when she said I could always knock on her door and—
Hours started to bleed. I took to wandering on foot. From the campus in Strand through Covent Garden, where the same man walked up to me with the same hat, same unrecognising eyes asking where I was from and if I would tip the performing musician. To China Town where comforting scents of freshly baked pineapple buns and buttery egg waffles, the waiters’ cheerful Cantonese greetings and street artists’ Jay Chou covers, went unrecognised half the time, but only half. Then Queensway, all the way across Hyde Park, whose resident squirrels hopefully batted lashes as they suffered human gibberish, and Oxford Street with its tourists to blend in and Strand again. Sore and worn out, when the last light of the sun threatened to go, I dragged my feet onto a bus towards the dormitory and the readings for the week’s classes. The words snuggled closer together and blurred. A girl has got to sleep, no matter how many skies have fallen, I might have read once. Well, not yet. I shrugged and sat up straighter. Netflix suddenly seemed like a fabulous idea.
Sleep came running. I held a hand up, not letting it come any closer. A bridge in the distance was aglow with warm yellow lights, its reflection on the river. An answering light flickered on the phone in my hand. It was morning, although it was the wee hours.
We had an uneasy truce, sleep and I. In the classroom my lecturer explained Odysseus’s slumber on his last returning voyage to Ithaca. And on him fell sweet oblivion that did not lift until… The rest of the sentence was lost. I stared down at the unsalvageable mess that was my notes. I was hearing him as if he were speaking underwater. Sleep slid into the empty seat on my right. I tightened my grip on my pen, determined to not give it satisfaction, no guilty grin. It tugged at my sleeve; I teetered on the edge, taut all over, and began counting the items on my list that I had slowly, surely, been getting through. Oh, the hide and seek was over, but we were in a tug of war. For a change, the upper hand was mine.
What if I stayed up to watch the city’s sunrise? The notion struck me from out of the blue, the eve of my flight home. M room was a jumble of clothes and books and tangled chargers, my laptop precariously balanced on the single clear corner of the desk, its screen frozen on a Word document, was pretty much blank, though most definitely should not be. Unimaginable a few months ago. Now it woke a thrill. What if I did not sleep? What if I did not have to?
Laughter from down the hall and the doors’ slamming faded into something muffled, something vague in the background, then ceased. It was silly to hurry. I had all the time till dawn. I ghosted around the room, idly typed a few sentences, blew dust from a stack of guides high up on the shelf, plucked up my Kindle for the umpteenth attempt to make progress with Gardens of the Moon, idly typed a few sentences. I plopped down on the soft bulge in the suitcase where I had tossed in my mittens and scarf on top of my winter coat. I was about ready to test the theory of toothpick eye-poles on myself when the weight on my eyelids…vanished. You know how you grit your teeth, you and your umbrella against the rain and wind, and right when you were going to surrender it passed? That was it, as my eyes widened to take in the first hint of pink on the horizon, the orange and gold seeping into the indigo, the reflective exterior of skyscrapers scattered across the city bringing a sudden explosion of light over the river. The insulated glass filtered out the temperature and hues, letting in only the rays, and I opened the window for a bit to let my fingers tingle in the morning air.
It was quite enough, I concluded. I might leave my troubles with sleep at the bottom of the Thames after all.
A ship horn sounds somewhere in the direction of the breakwater. I see no bridge, but the Victoria Harbour skyline presents itself, ablaze, in fragments wedged into gaps between tall buildings opposite mine. The night is ebbing little by little as I dally. Any further with my night reading and it will become something else entirely. My Twitter timeline has fully exhausted itself after my incessant refreshing. In the swimming vision are sleep’s hands gently, firmly, on my eyes. I lock the phone’s screen, lie down, and tell myself a bedtime story:
Once, there was a princess cursed at birth to fall into a deep sleep upon the prick of a spindle. Weaved so that she was ever drawn to fulfil the destined century’ worth of dreaming, the curse pulled night and day with its threads for her head to nod, her limbs to tire, her eyelids to droop and her mind to yearn for beds.
“But what of her duties?” The king was distraught.
“But what of love?” The queen was aghast.
“But what of friends and parties and all the things young girls do?” The fairy godmothers were at a loss.
They decided to stall. One teased out a handful of threads to twine around a cottage in the heart of the woods, far from home and spindles. Another threaded a needle to embroider, into the bindings of books and the very fabric of the internet. The remainder of the cursed threads they scattered to the wind, so the princess’s attention would ride the currents to all that kept one awake, even as every breath she took was permeated with the aching need for sleep…
Deep sleep might have been exactly what she wished for, if they had only thought of asking. She does not know what it is she wishes anymore.
There is a note of indignance creeping into Sleep’s seduction. My fingers inch back to the phone I put down a mere minute ago. I grab at the tail of the princess’s story I have just told and watch it slip into mine.
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