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Cygnus atratus

Sometimes, when Zach had too much coffee, when he had sneaked a smoke on the back porch that projects out over the weedy ground and right up to the back wall, beyond which is the alley and driveway of an apartment complex in drab rose and orange, sometimes he would lie awake until there was a subtle shift in his sensibilities that was almost like a buzz encompassing him, and he would go on thinking about the events of the day even as he drifted off to sleep and then awoke again, minutes later, and was still thinking about them, like an unbroken chain of reasoning that suffered a momentary dip. But there was always a specter hanging in the facts and the faces and the ideas, like an irrational interloper. Only a fever ever reproduced anything like those moments—like that specter—only a fever could twist ideas over themselves into the impossible and weird motifs that were a merger of sleep and waking fantasies. Zach would rouse in those moments or sometimes bolt upright while trying to reclaim the ideas and force them into a coherent whole, but then, when the pieces had regained their permanence and the puzzle was reunited and showed, once again, the rational and calm artwork on the box of everyday reality, Zach would find himself longing for that alternative state, for the confusion that he struggled to subdue in the hypnagogic fog. It was not just curiosity, he realized, but a sense that there was a constructive event surfacing out of his unconscious self—an event that was using his memories for some special purpose.

There was an ameliorative effect to the anxieties of the day that crept in at those moments, like a sieve had strained all the complexity out of the bursts of nervous arousal, and he would lean back again into the hollow of his down pillow that smelled like his hair, tinged by his shampoo, and turn his face into the dome, sliding his cheek against the silky weave of the pillowcase, finally thinking that sleep would arrive soon.… Read the rest