loopinfinite

Four o’clock this morning, I could not sleep. I had been lying in the dark for over an hour. I had tried sleeping on my left side, on my right side, on my back, on my stomach. I was looking for the perfect position but I couldn’t find it.

I saw myself as an action figure. Two arms, two legs, head, chest and torso, every component linked to another at a point of articulation. I saw myself as a complex math problem, as a case study in topology. My body and bed were wire-frame models defined by a system of equations. Given that raw data, where was the solution?

Four o’clock this morning, I sat up, walked the two feet to the kitchen island. In a studio apartment, everything is next to everything else. My whole life’s compacted into one room. The density is staggering. I’ve lived here more than three years. Every square foot of space has its story.

I can step back through those stories, trace the narrative of this space. I can turn time backwards and see my wrinkled shirts leap out of the pile on my futon and fly into my closet. I can see the pile of books in the corner grow and shrink, grow and shrink, like it’s breathing.

Go far enough back and the furniture rearranges itself. Visitors appear in the middle of the room and then walk backwards out the door.

I can take this room back to the very beginning and then step it forward to now. I can look at any point whenever I want. I was rewinding and fast-forwarding my apartment long before Google Wave came along.

I started opening drawers in the dark, one and then another. I knew what I was looking for, but I didn’t know where it was. I can’t keep any of those drawers straight. They’re all the same to me. It turned out the second drawer from the bottom was the one I wanted. In there, behind the Ziploc bags and aluminum foil and plastic wrap, was the little white bottle.

Was it a bottle? Was that the word? Or was it a canister? It was an opaque plastic cylinder. A common object, familiar to anyone who’s ever taken a pill of any kind. There had to have been a specific term. Why couldn’t I remember it?

At four in the morning, shivering on the cold kitchen tile, I started worrying about my vocabulary, about my mind. What if words were trickling out every day? What if my mind had developed a leak?

I tried to reassure myself. Maybe it was just a natural part of getting old. Then I checked myself. I was only twenty-one. I wasn’t old yet. Then why did I feel so old?

I turned on the kitchen light to see the pill cylinder better, to double-check that this was the right one. It was. The red cap, the blue label with the CVS logo in the background and the block letters spelling out Melatonin, 3mg, nighttime sleep aid.**

I rolled the bottle over, saw the warning on the back: ** – These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.

I looked at the expiration date. November 2010. Amazing. I’d half-expected the pills to have expired. I bought these so long ago, July of 2007.

The whole series of events that had led to me buying the melatonin came back to me. The clarity of the memory was startling. I guess I’m better at preserving the bittersweet past than I am at preserving what I learned in pathology class.

I swallowed the melatonin pill and crawled back into bed, thinking about July 2007.

There was this one night that I got hideously drunk. Two in the morning, I was calling my friend Hazel (not her real name) and telling her I “loved” her. I told her this again and again. When she hung up, I called her back and continued telling her what I had already told her.

She interrupted me. “Listen,” she said, “you’re drunk. Go to bed.”

I said, “You know, that’s a good idea.”

The next morning, I had a terrible hangover. I had a headache in a very literal sense – my head really ached, a dull and dry ache that came from the actual bones of my skull. I poured myself a glass of water.

I turned my laptop on and played some low-level music. David Bowie, “Drive-In Saturday,” one of my favorite songs. It describes a shattered, post-apocalyptic world where the remnants of humanity are dying out because nobody can remember how to make love. They study old porn flicks to remember.

I was leaning back on the futon, trying to relax. My left hand clutching my head, my right hand clutching my water, my laptop next to me, blaring Bowie.

My cell phone rang. I put the water down and picked up.

Hazel said, “I just wanted to make sure you were okay. You were pretty drunk last night.”

“Yeah, I was,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

Hazel told me I needed to stop drinking. I told her this was a nice idea in theory but the problem was that I was depressed and also a writer and depressed writers were supposed to be alcoholics, I was pretty sure that was a law.

Hazel told me I was being an idiot. I conceded this point. Hazel said that if I was really depressed, I shouldn’t be self-medicating with alcohol. Hazel asked if I had heard of St. John’s wort.

“The hell is St. John’s wort?”

“It’s this stuff. People take it if they’re depressed. You can buy it over-the-counter. It’s an herb. You should consider taking it.”

I told her maybe. I told her maybe I’d start taking St. John’s wort and maybe I’d start taking melatonin too. I told her I’d been having a lot of trouble sleeping lately. I said I’d read that melatonin can help with that, with the circadian rhythm.

“Oh no,” Hazel said. “You really shouldn’t take melatonin.”

“Why not?”

“It decreases your levels of gonadotropin-releasing hormone. It lowers your sperm count.” Hazel knew this because she was a med student. I was a med student, too, but not the kind of med student who knew actual information.

“That’s kind of the least of my concerns right now, Hazel.”

My laptop’s soft music wafted toward my right ear. Not my left ear , of course. That one was cupped to my phone. My left ear was listening to Hazel, who was laughing.

My right ear was listening to David Bowie, who was now singing “Time,” because “Drive-In Saturday” had long ago ended.

“Time,” David Bowie said, “he flexes like a whore. Falls wanking to the floor. His trick is you and me, boy.” David Bowie is not a great lyricist.

“Still,” Hazel said, “it’s your sperm count. You wouldn’t want to mess that up. Someday you’ll get married and you won’t be able to have a kid and you’ll have to tell your wife, I’m sorry, but I’m sterile now because I took a lot of melatonin in college, and she’ll leave you.”

“Okay, Hazel,” I said, “Tonight, when I go over to my nonexistent girlfriend’s nonexistent house, I’ll warn her about my sperm count. I’ll tell her if she wants to have nonexistent kids, she’d better not get her hopes up. I’ll tell her all this upfront. Full disclosure. Problem solved.”

It was a pretty forced joke. It wasn’t funny. Hazel laughed anyway. Did she think it was funny or was she just trying to be polite?

I liked Hazel’s laugh enough that I found myself constantly saying things designed, specifically, to make her laugh, things that had no other meaning, that conveyed no information other than my implicit desire to hear her laughter. Weak, lame attempts at humor.

Later that evening, when my headache was gone, I went to CVS. I bought the melatonin. I bought the St. John’s wort. I started taking both. I stopped taking the melatonin early on, because I was paranoid about my sperm count. I kept taking the St. John’s wort, though, every day. The capsules had a musty, herbal scent.

When the bottle (or canister, or whatever) of St. John’s wort ran out, I bought another, and then another after that. Was it helping my depression? I knew, objectively, that it probably was not, but I wanted to believe it was helping, and sometimes wanting to believe is enough. Belief is powerful.

I took the St. John’s wort through the end of 2007, and I felt pretty good through the end of 2007. I stopped taking the St. John’s wort in the beginning of 2008, and I felt pretty bad in the beginning of 2008. In April or May, desperate, I started trying to take St. John’s wort again. It wasn’t doing anything. I wasn’t willing to believe, I guess. It was out of my control. I threw the St. John’s wort away. I kept the melatonin in the back of a drawer.

This morning I woke up at eight am. I woke up with the sun. My circadian rhythm was right on schedule. Should I credit the melatonin, or should I credit my belief that it would help me?

This afternoon, a friend of mine came over. He saw a canister on my futon, not the melatonin one but a translucent orange one. Prescription medication. My friend picked it up.

“What is this stuff?” he said.

I didn’t really want to tell the truth, but it seemed like it would be pointless to lie.

“Those,” I said, “are my antidepressants.”

“You take antidepressants?”

“Yes.”

“You’re depressed?”

“Yes.”

“How long have you been depressed?”

“Probably my whole life,” I deadpanned. I don’t know whether I was joking.

“I had no idea.”

He put the canister down. I was weirdly grateful that he didn’t make a big deal out of it, that he didn’t become accusatory, that he didn’t take pity on me.

He just shrugged and said, “So do those pills actually work?”

“To tell you the truth, I don’t know.”

“How long have you been taking them?”

“July 2008,” I said. I knew it to the day. July 3rd, 2008. (I don’t want to talk about July 3rd, 2008 now. Maybe someday.)

I don’t know if the pills work. They don’t seem to do much, if anything, but I’d like to think that they’re helping.

The pills might as well be magic. I know nothing about them, nothing about what they do or how or why. I know about their “mechanism of action” and I know about their “pharmacodynamics.” But that’s just so much gibberish. What is a neurotransmitter? What is a receptor? How do I know these things exist? How can I really understand what’s in this hard white tablet? You can explain everything to me, but I still only see a hard white tablet.

Every time I get a refill, CVS gives me a little data sheet that has the chemical structure of the drug I take printed on it, and what does that mean? It’s supposedly a visual representation of the molecule, but nobody knows what a molecule looks like. A molecule is too small to see.

It’s frightening how little I know. I think as modern knowledge expands and diversifies, as people specialize, as progress marches forward, individual people come to know less and less. We depend on the experts to know everything. We depend on mechanical engineers and electrical engineers and bioengineers to build the systems that define the way we live, but the average person knows nothing about this stuff.

We defer to the experts and offload the burden of understanding to them. To the average person, all technology is magic. I don’t understand the most basic things. I have trouble changing lightbulbs. I don’t understand the electrical grid. Electricity’s always pulsing through my walls, surging through outlets, but how? How is that possible?

Sometimes I wish I lived in the stone age. Everything was straightforward back then. A sharp stick is a piece of technology everyone can understand. A sharp stick is not a pill. It always works, no matter what you believe.