Between falls

Cold world tonight outside the glass. As usual, nothing appears to be alive. No world transformed. Nothing trudging through it. Silence is one indication of my control over this world. This desire to be up after others have passed through into their slumber. No curse, this; no swear words necessary. Pleasing—though not without a dryness around the eyes, weary sensation one, and total darkness in the tower, weary sensation two, and a sense of slowly shuffling off towards sleep. If I had more to me I could stay up until three or four, or five, when the old begin to stir and fill their mugs with something dark and steaming. I admire them for this singular pleasure. My parents were this way, awake and away to their days for hours before I would stir. Now on occasion I am up before the light, before the night subsides and the factories along the water turn down their smokestack output to avoid being found out for what they in fact are. And if I am aware of anything at that hour, I am grateful for it, this glimpse of early motion that I do not normally get.

I wish I could get by with three or four hours of sleep, that I could work late and awake with no effect on the body's defenses. Imagine what I could be privy to—the motions of the trash trucks on their circuits through the grid. Different sorts of snow. Traffic patterns that don't occur in daylight or late-night hours. They might look from above like halos, or precipitation (more than traffic does already, that steady or sometimes clotted stream), like the video game Frogger, or diamonds chugging through a tube. It could look like anything, and I would be there to witness it, somehow. This would be a kind of power, secret revelation. Vivisection, maybe. Pattern recognition. Precognition even.

This is desire for knowledge. Desire for bragging rights. Desire for the ability to shovel out the walk before anyone else in the time zone does. Desire—a cloud, an ampersand of thrills hovering closely together, on the edge of my mind, outside of reason. It's there and silent mostly in this life, punching chemical signals through pneumatic tubes to the brain. But it wants things. It is active often enough to pull me one way or another one, towards one body in rest or motion.