Would Not Shorten
The distractions run out in a particular order, and if you have had enough of these nights you can feel them going. Work goes first, because at some point there is nothing left that can be done before morning. Then the phone, which stops producing anything new. Then whatever you were watching, which you were not watching. Then the small domestic tasks, the glass rinsed, the light in the hall, and then there is a room with you in it and nothing else scheduled.
It arrives on time. It does not need to be summoned and it is never a surprise, which is the part people outside these nights never quite believe. You know exactly what it is going to be. You have known since about four in the afternoon, when you first noticed yourself being unusually busy. And still there is a small and completely unreasonable hope, every single time, that tonight it might not come, and then it comes, and you turn it over, and the edges of it are so familiar by now that you could describe them to a stranger.
At some point he began doing the sum. Everyone does the sum. If he fell asleep in the next twenty minutes he would still get four hours, which is survivable. Then it was three, which is a bad day but a day. Then it was ninety minutes, at which point the sum reverses itself and becomes a different calculation entirely: how long until it is reasonable to simply get up, put the kettle on, and stop pretending this was ever going to be a night of sleep.
The bed was not the problem and he knew it. He could have moved to the chair, the sofa, the floor. What he actually wanted was an exit, and the specific cruelty of the hour is that it offers you one, over and over, and it does not work.
Nothing, is the honest answer, and also that is not quite true. The thing itself was in exactly the same condition at half past five as it had been at midnight. No decision had been reached. No new information had arrived. If you had asked him at dawn what he had achieved he would have said, correctly, that he had achieved staying awake, which is not an achievement.
And yet somewhere between four and five the grip had loosened by a few degrees. Not because he solved anything. Because the body eventually runs out of the fuel required to keep a thought at full brightness, and what is left afterwards is the same thought at a lower temperature, which turns out to be a thing you can live beside. He had not won. He had outlasted, which is the only available result and is not nothing.
The line at the curtain arrives before you expect it and it is never dramatic. A grey edge. Then a car somewhere, then a second car, then the particular clatter of somebody else beginning an ordinary day who has no idea what kind of night you have had and is under no obligation to. The world restarts without consulting you, and there is something almost kind in how little it cares.
He got up. Washed, which helped more than it should have. Dressed, which helped more than washing. Nothing was fixed and he was extremely tired and there was warmth underneath the tiredness anyway, and he was going to go and do the day. Gratitude at that hour is very modest. It consists almost entirely of the observation that the night has ended and you are still here to find out what comes next.
The house built the vigil you can wear. Three roses at the centre, gathered close rather than opened wide: Bulgarian rose clear and spiced, centifolia honeyed and dense, gallica dry and old and apothecary, reading as one flower with unusual gravity. Then French cocoa absolute underneath them, bitter and dusty and not remotely a dessert, which takes the prettiness away and leaves the beauty. Omani frankincense, cistus and myrrh close the room around them, and a white ambergris tincture puts one saline breath of air back into it. Lower down it goes to the floor: aged Sulawesi patchouli, oakmoss, nagarmotha drawing a dry smoky root through everything, sinking root sandalwood from NTT heavy enough to hold it, fermented Laotian oud anchoring, castoreum exposing. And last, very late, vanilla planifolia and tonka bean, arriving at exactly the hour when the body finally lets go of some of its tension.
The night did not shorten.
He simply came out of the other end of it.
There is no exit from certain hours and there was never going to be one. There is only the far side, and the surprising discovery that you are the sort of person who reaches it.