if there had been other dawns like this one. He sought them among the dawns when he had returned home after nights spent walking in the woods or screaming from the riverbank. The dawn after a sleepless night is the worst time for someone who has to stay awake. He had always hated it - hated the silence, the false innocence of all the differents savoring their last minutes of sleep. He would return home feeling tense, with nausea and stomach cramps. Often he’d kneel down with his head over the toilet, his arms braced against the wall, ready to vomit out the whole wide world. But nothing ever came up. For how can you vomit out a thing like wakefulness?
But now his hatred of the dawn had suddenly vanished, to be replaced by guilt at having hated it so much. Guilt at having found the system. Yet despite the thrill of caressing the system in his pocket, he felt uneasy, and for some reason unworthy. He wondered whether that feeling of guilt might actually be an alarm bell. A warning against taking the system for granted. After all, why should he trust a guy he had never met before, who loafed around under the North Aberdeen Bridge like the hobos and ate poisonous fish?
He had no reason to trust him. But he wanted to trust him, nonetheless. He had made up his mind to trust him, from the outset. He had never met anyone like Kurt. Anyone so sad and so… He stopped to think. Then - though it wasn’t easy for him to formulate such a concept - he finished his imaginary sentence. So beautiful.
Besides, he couldn’t take any more, he just wanted to sleep. And he’d decided to trust Kurt because he was too tired to go on resisting. Fuck the change and fuck the differents. Do what the hell you like, but let me sleep. This, too, was an ambivalent feeling, however. Now that he finally had the system, the imminent prospect of sleep made him almost nostalgic about the continuum that he was about to break. It was almost painful to bid farewell to the dimension of heroic voluntary insomnia in which he had lived all those years.
When he got home he slumped on the couch and stared at his own thoughts, mirrored in the void before him. He was trembling. He stood up and took the bag of system out of his pocket. He laid it on the coffee table where he usually rested his feet, boots and all. He slumped back onto the couch. He let out a long, slow breath. Then he sat up straight, the way people do in dentists’ waiting rooms. He was trembling a little less now. Again he stared at his thoughts, now mirrored in the little pouch on the table.
There was little to see, in truth. The questions to trust or not to trust, to try or not to try, were merely token scruples of his conscience. Not that everything was crystal clear, of course. On the contrary. The reflections he saw in the glassine bag were only too opaque, morally speaking. Homer was well aware that the system must have side-effects. Any remedy does. And often, the more effective the remedy, the more dangerous the side-effects. Even the first amendment was subject to this greater, universal law. It was not unusual for some unlucky citizen to get a bullet in the forehead because this was a free country.
But Homer had decided to put off considering the side-effects until a more appropriate moment, though he sensed that by the time that moment came it would already be too late. He found himself in the condition described by a Russian writer of the previous century: that of a person who has reached the final frontier. In practice, he was delaying the time when he would take his decision; he was like someone who gazes across the final frontier and glimpses on the other side, far away on the horizon, the unknown consequences of that decision. Moments of aesthetic uncertainty. Anyone who comes to the final frontier always oversteps the limit. In every sense.
Perhaps the only one of his mirrored thoughts over which he lingered was his memory of what Kurt had told him about Boddah. Eventually Boddah had disappeared. This had happened when Uncle Clark had asked Kurt if he could take Boddah with him on his next trip to Vietnam, where he was being sent on military service because of some war that was going on out there. Boddah could keep him company, Uncle Clark said.
‘So he went out there and never came back,’ Homer had surmised.
Kurt had gazed at him quizzically. Then he’d explained: ‘Boddah didn’t exist. That’s why they wanted to send him to Vietnam.’
‘Huh?’ Homer didn’t get it.
‘To force me out into the open, don’t you see? My mother was tired of laying the table for someone who didn’t exist. So Uncle Clark made up the Vietnam story to force me to admit that Boddah didn’t exist, that he was a figment of my imagination.’
Now at last it was clear. We all have imaginary friends when we’re small. But there was something else in all this that defied logic, something Kurt hadn’t explained to him. Something that cast a sinister shadow over the whole situation. But what the hell? Sinister shadows were always being cast over all kinds of situation, Homer mused. Life was too short to worry about them all.
He slouched further down in the cushions and stared at the glassine pouch, which no longer mirrored any thoughts. His life was going to change. Man, was it going to change.
He cracked his knuckles and sighed.
It changed all right. Man, did it change. It was as if a chasm had suddenly opened up, splitting time into two distinct ages: systemic on the one side, presystemic on the other. Far more than simply enabling him to sleep, the system transformed and colored every aspect of his life. Before long, the distinction between the two ages became second nature to Homer, and he found he could instantly slot things into one or the other category. As time passed, his life became more and more systemized, and the traces of the presystemic age grew correspondingly weaker. Yet they didn’t entirely fade away: they were constantly popping up at the most unexpected moments and in the remotest corners of his days. They’d suddenly appear in front of him, alarming links between his present state as a Homer systemicus and his former one as a Homer insomnis. They were like fossils of some creature that was now extinct or unidentifiable, so deeply buried in his consciousness that he couldn’t be sure it had ever existed.
There came a point where he could scarcely believe that he, a magnificent specimen of Homer systemicus of the family Alienson, had ever been a Homer insomnis. That earlier incarnation seemed like a remote ancestor, a kind of prosimian that had managed to survive in a state of continuous wakefulness, as the eutherian mammals in prehistoric times had adapted to life in the trees.
But Homer was not aware of the metabolic changes that the system wrought in him. If he had been, he might have realized that it was his present, not his former self, that was more ape-like. For by this time he was totally and utterly systemized.
It wasn’t like that at first, however. The beginning was bland, impalpable and diffuse. A blissful, heavenly calm. A beginning so gentle and evanescent that it was almost imperceptible. He often recalled, in later times, the hazy moments of the dawn, those dilated instants when everything, beginning with the coffee table in front of the couch, took on the consistency of foam rubber. He would sit on the summit of the world, watching, and between the foam-rubber world and his vantage point the air seemed to condense into a protective film that cushioned or muffled the offensive solidity of objects and the menacing hostility of the human race. If ever he had been destined to experience moments of happiness, those moments must have been the early days of the system. They were his golden age, his paradise lost, his nirvana before death.
Unfortunately, the era of happiness in which he thought he was living receded, slowly but remorselessly, into the past. Eventually it vanished completely, except for occasional flashes, sadistic manifestations that only served to intensify
