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 became clear even to his father that the boy couldn’t stay in Montesano, and after being shuttled about an uncertain number of times between various relatives, Homer was sent back to his mother. She, however, was not only even more different than before, and far from overjoyed to see her son again, but had found herself a man who was even worse - if that was conceivable - than the husband she had ditched. He was a sailor, and a pretty weird one. A paranoid schizophrenic. Homer’s mother never knew whether he was really at sea or not, and when he was at home he would often beat her up. His voice was rough with alcohol and he was always coming home smelling of other women’s perfume.
One day Homer’s mother took her revenge. She was tired of people dropping by the store where she worked to say, ‘Guess who I saw your sailor with the other night?’ She went out with a friend and got drunk. But instead of feeling relieved, she got so mad at her partner that when she came home she took out one of the guns he kept in a little closet and tried to shoot him. The incident was over before it started because she didn’t even know how to load a gun. But since she had to do something, she put all the guns in a sack and dumped them in the icy waters of the river Wishkah. Homer watched from a distance, and in the middle of the night, while everyone else was sleeping the sleep of the different, he fished out the guns and sold them. Naturally, he invested the proceeds in space toys, among them a particularly rare early specimen, a Günthermann Sky Rocket, which had been manufactured in the American zone of postwar West Germany, but was now, through the mysterious workings of destiny, gathering dust on a remote shelf in a store on Route 12.
These were difficult years, as can readily be imagined. He didn’t feel at ease anywhere. Things were completely out of control. He never had a moment’s peace, and just when it would seem to him that something was on the point of sorting itself out, lo and behold that something would suddenly change, leaving him alone. He always had to be on the alert. Whenever he went out with his mother - to go shopping, say - he’d notice men looking at her in a way that drove him wild. ‘Mom, that man’s looking at you!’ he’d say to her.
‘Don’t be silly,’ his mother would snap, and then as likely as not return the smile. One day a man eyed his mother in an even more objectionable manner than usual and Homer, beside himself with rage, ran to find a policeman and told him about it. The officer looked down at him with that condescending air so typical of adults and dismissed him with a smile. From that day on, Homer hated cops. They were different, too, like everybody else. They were all in it together. A vast web of glances, grimaces and knowing gestures was being spun around him, and sooner