behavior. Impermeability. Insensibility. He resolved to reduce communication with others to a minimum, and spent all the time on his own, concentrating on his collection of space toys.
But if the second point wasn’t much of a problem, the first - how to avoid being body-snatched - had a drastic solution. It was perfectly simple in theory, but in practice … in practice it meant giving up sleeping. Because that was how the change came about. You fell asleep and you woke up different.
In the film footage, Dr Bennell had spoken of how people often became dehumanized, losing their identity so gradually that they weren’t aware of any alteration in themselves.
Homer couldn’t agree more. That was exactly how it had happened. His mother, the garbage man and all the others. The change was imperceptibly slow until the final, irrevocable moment of palpable difference. But this didn’t make it any easier to accept the drawbacks of the solution. It’s all very well to talk, but how are you supposed to react when somebody comes along and tells you it’s quite easy, all you have to do is not sleep?
All you have to do, he says.
Homer Alienson’s voluntary insomnia continued for an extraordinary length of time. Nigh on eighteen years, give or take a month or two. This was not an easy period, nor was it devoid of consequences. It was an established scientific fact, even in those days, that the need for a periodic suspension of the activities of the will and the consciousness - a need sometimes referred to as ‘switching off - was necessary to the regeneration of physical and/or psychological efficiency. It had, moreover, been proven that a prolonged lack of sleep made you irritable, altered your metabolism, and led to feelings of nausea and states of hallucination. This knowledge, however, was based on studies that embraced a limited time span or at least a period below the critical threshold of ninety-six hours. Homer was unique. He was the only case of a higher living organism that had permanently succeeded in eliminating from its metabolism the physiological need to switch off. How he succeeded in doing so is still a matter of debate. There is no doubt that he was determined not to fail in his intention and sincerely convinced that he never had, but since nobody was there to keep a check on him, we cannot be absolutely sure that he did not inadvertently close his eyes now and then.
But whether it was partial or total, his self-imposed, continuous insomnia did have one consequence. It caused a kind of temporal displacement of Homer’s whole existence. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to describe it as a hitherto unknown form of hibernation.
What happened, put very simply, was that while the time of the world around him continued to flow at its usual speed, Homer’s sleepless time expanded by almost a decade. The years passed, but Homer’s years remained the same, and from that February 20th, 1967 when he took his momentous decision, Homer continued to be the nine-year-old kid that he had been then. By constantly staying awake through the icy darkness of the night, he put his best years in the freezer, like a packet of frozen peas, a reserve to be consumed at the right moment, when it was safe for him to sleep again.
It was as if he had been assigned a new birth date: February 20th, 1967. It was like coming into the world a second time to spend sleepless nights watching the drops of rain slide glistening down the window pane. And while his mother slept peacefully in all her difference, Homer lay on his bed listening to the rhythm of his own breathing, the rhythm that accompanied the profoundly sad darkness of those hours when all was still, except the rain that fell and those glistening drops that slid down the window pane, one single, immense, everlasting moment.
Never sleeping.
* * *
Many years later, when our story reached its inevitable conclusion, when there was nothing more to say, and to add anything would have seemed not only gratuitous but disrespectful, Homer B. Alienson’s mother issued a statement.
‘Our divorce was a devastating experience for him. It destroyed his life. He became … how can I put it? Totally sad. You couldn’t say anything to him. He was so irritable. Always sullen. Tetchy. He slept very little, I could hear him tossing and turning in his bed till late at night. He always had been hyper. Some time before, the doctor had put him on a course of Ritalin, but that only made him even more nervous. Sometimes he didn’t go to sleep till four in the morning. And after I split from my husband he just went wild. The divorce and the Ritalin were an explosive mixture. He seemed to stop sleeping altogether. He was always brooding on things. On the bathroom wall he wrote DAD SUCKS and MOM SUCKS with an arrow pointing to the toilet bowl. He was mad at us, that’s obvious. And he lost all enthusiasm. He wasn’t interested in anything, apart from his space toys. He became very inward, too. He’d go whole days without saying a word. He held everything in. It was as if he distrusted everything and everybody. He hadn’t been like that, before. He changed completely. He was different.’
Different, him. That was rich, coming from her. Oh sure, he was different. Different in the sense that they’d fucked up his life for good and all. ‘The truth is, I had nothing in common with them,’ Homer would have said, if he’d been in a fit state to make any comment. ‘I don’t want to push this body-snatcher business too far. Maybe they weren’t as different as all that. But even supposing I got things out of proportion, the problem is that when you’re nine years old and you find you no longer have a family, you feel… unworthy. Yeah. That’s the word. Unworthy. You feel ill at ease with your friends.’
Friends? What friends?
‘Well, okay, not exactly friends. Classmates. The kids I hung out with. They all had normal families and did the things people do in normal families. In our family, nothing was normal.’
After the divorce it was agreed that Homer would live with his mother. But that didn’t last long. By now he had become impossible to handle. After a year, at her wits’ end, his mother sent him to live with his father, who’d moved to Montesano, another logging town not far from Aberdeen.
Homer was far from happy with the new arrangement. They camped out in a trailer park, in a sort of prefabricated shack on wheels. It was the pits. He had nothing to do except ride his bike down to the beach. What’s more, he was constantly anxious about his space toys. He was terrified by the - by no means implausible - thought that his mother would throw them out. He must return to Aberdeen.
‘My mother was bad enough, but my father was a real asshole. He was obsessed with sports. Baseball and that kind of thing. I was hopeless at sports, but he wouldn’t accept it. He had never been any good at sports himself. But despite that he insisted I join the wrestling team. I hated wrestling. I hated the gym too. And the jocks that went there, and the training. Everything.’
After the move to Montesano, Homer’s father found a job as a tallyman in a logging company. Whenever he had a day off, he’d take his son to his workplace.
‘It was his idea of a father-and-son day out,’ Homer would explain. ‘He’d leave me sitting in the office while he went and counted logs. He did nothing else all day. Even on his days off.’
An intolerable situation. To make matters worse, Homer had a new mother to contend with. ‘A really sweet woman,’ was his father’s description of her. Homer took a different view, and when, a few years later, he reminisced about his father’s new partner, his judgment was scathing: ‘I’ve never met anyone so two-faced. And she was a lousy cook. You’d come home and find a disgusting, shriveled-up meal on your plate that she’d lovingly prepared and left sitting in the oven for a few hours.’
Homer spent most of the time in his father’s cluttered toolroom, and when he poked his head out he’d find that his father had bought some new toy for his younger stepbrothers. Useless Tonka trucks or stupid Starhorses.
It
