Microfiction: 'Side Effects'

Whenever Ivan couldn't sleep--and that was often--he'd lie on his back, staring up at a ceiling blank and white as a sheet of paper. He'd try to imagine the ink-dark sky above the house, with its spattering of stars, inconceivably distant. But thinking about the sky didn't help. The pillow beneath his head, the mattress beneath his body, never felt quite comfortable as he would toss and turn. They'd irritate him, in fact, as if loose grains of sand littered the sheets.

So he'd lie wide awake in bed, his head feeling like a hall of mirrors, reflecting an unceasing cavalcade of the previous day's predicaments. They would flash through his memory like over-exposed snapshots. And he'd think: "I should have done this; I should have done that."

He would tell himself to stop thinking so much.

But then he'd become much too aware of the night sounds around him. Down the street, a cat would yowl in the alley like an angry baby. An ambulance would howl urgently, as if in great pain, on its way to the hospital. And somewhere, miles away, a train would be lumbering its lugubrious way down the moon-silver rails. Click, clack, click clack....

Eventually, Ivan sought professional help. But the side effects of the medication the doctor prescribed, Baniem, were worse than he could have anticipated -- worse, in some ways, than the dull plague of sleeplessness. The doctor had warned him about a "scramble brain" feeling, and possible speech "abnormalities," but the things that were spilling out of his mouth were more disconcerting than that. "We are the oven-ready wood-chips," he found himself saying, involuntarily, to the woman behind the counter at Starbucks. "We are here to protect you from the vegetarian psychiatrist Bugs Bunny." All he had wanted was a Tall. The woman rolled her eyes. "Go gyre and gimble in the wabe," she said.

"Have you got my disgusting Chinese meal's hippie wig?" Ivan asked his mother over the phone. He had wanted to ask about a book he thought he had left at her house. "Your what? Um...It might be in the basement," she said. "I can't keep track of all your stuff."

At work, Ivan suddenly said to his supervisor, "I wish you wouldn't wolf-whistle at those spaghetti hoops." "What?" the man said. "It's...a song lyric," Ivan lied. "Have you heard that one?" His supervisor shook his head and sighed. "No," he said. "I wish you wouldn't memorize all that brain spam." "A dog collar in the wine cask is worth two in the laser printer," Ivan replied. "I'd rather not work for a cream cake."

This was getting serious.

Ivan called his doctor to complain, but as usual, the doctor was not in. The answering service asked if he wanted to leave a message. "If you want to smear mustard on salt cellars, you'll need to barbecue a carpet tile," Ivan said. "I am a level 5 Frankenstein mask, in parsnip-world!" The operator was not amused and hung up on him. "Belligerent magpie," he muttered.

Ivan's friend, Marcus, had an idea about how to reduce the verbal chaos. "What is it?" Ivan asked. "I'm desperate. Engorge apples like a serendipitous peanut."

"We'll start acting out some of the things you say, at least the easier ones, and see what happens," said Marcus. It seemed like a plan, or at least Ivan couldn't think of a better idea. "Come, let me detest thee," he said. "I don't mean that.... Um, I'd rather paint the Union Jack on a lactose-intolerant boulder than debug a sparkly blender."

Marcus wrote that down. "As good as any," he said. They went for a hike in the woods on Saturday and found a large, dark rock that looked like it might be as lactose-intolerant as any rock could be. They had brought some poster paints and painted a close approximation of the British flag on it. When they were done, Ivan felt slightly relieved. He didn't say anything bizarre for an entire hour.

Over the next week, Ivan and Marcus managed to tie-dye a trench coat, enclose an alarm clock in a cocoon of bubble-wrap, and secretly feed marzipan to a gazelle at the zoo. They poured hot soup over a dictionary, threw clam shells at taxi-cab, and drop-kicked a wastepaper basket full of lemons. Each time, Ivan was able to control his utterances for a longer period. He was sleeping better too, and stopped taking the Baniem.

He felt cured and rested, but also curiously empty as all the nonsense talk at last faded away. And though the insomnia was gone, he couldn't help lying awake some nights, thinking about oven-ready wood chips, a hippie wig, and the Union Jack still on a rock in the forest.

This story is based on the side effects of a real insomnia drug (whose name is an anagram of Baniem) that I heard about. It is NOT autobiographical. Really!