Sometimes night-time...

"Sometimes night-time is best/Goodnight Edgar; Goodnight Paul."




Sometimes night-time is best.

This is a thought that Edgar often considers. The day-time does him no good. Another morning getting up, wishing it was sleep he was wiping away instead of tears. In fact, I probably shouldn’t have typed that last word, as it paints Edgar in a rather bad light, as if the fact that his name was Edgar wasn’t torment enough. But cry Edgar does, and he hates the fact, because for the most part, he has an essentialist view of the world. Girls cry, boys don’t. He gets that from his father, and he is, or at least, he was too afraid of his father to disagree, but now that his father is dead, essentialism has become habit, and so Edgar essentialises in an essentially essentialist way. We should forgive him for that. Habit is a very easy thing to get into, and very hard to escape. It is a vicious cycle, or perhaps a spiral, where the same reaction is repeated and repeated and repeated until it implodes at the centre and then stops. Crying in the morning has become a habit from Edgar, and he worries about when the centre will implode, all over him. He has tried to stop crying in the morning, but it feels good doing it, in a way. It feels unhealthy too, and so Edgar is confused. He knows it is disruptive. He doesn’t have partners stay over anymore, because he thinks they may not find crying in the morning sexually attractive. He hasn’t tested his hypothesis, but then he’d rather not. Now he is dating a born-again Christian, which he thinks has solved his problems, but it hasn’t.

          Edgar has a co-worker called Paul who often speaks about “the game”. Edgar doesn’t know what Paul means, but thinks Paul is a twat, and he’s probably right. Paul once paid a girlfriend to have an abortion because he didn’t want it (conversely she sometimes cries when she wakes up too), but we can’t dismiss Paul in so brief an assessment. In terms of literature, and even in reality, this is a character assassination. Paul takes pills every morning because his father is dying and he can’t cope with it. There now. Do we suddenly pity he who so repulsed us seconds ago? Maybe. Maybe not. It depends on your personal moralistic view, but getting into such a subject would make this a very long piece, so let us continue. Paul’s past is firmly in the past. He doesn’t believe there is anything wrong with abortion, and doesn’t judge any woman who would have one. He does believe there is something wrong with his beloved father slowly dying, but he still gets up in the morning (sans tears, of course), puts a smirk on his face and prays that nobody asks him about Daddy. He desperately wants to wallow in a pit of self-pity, but Paul is a social creature and has rent to pay, so he goes to work and talks to people and exists, because he doesn’t know how to do anything else. He is not a good person, but few people are.

          Edgar certainly isn’t. Edgar isn’t good because he isn’t honest. Edgar lies. When his sister had a baby, he cooed over it and told her how adorable it was, but he didn’t believe it. Edgar has no strong feelings towards babies. They don’t do much. He may show more of an interest when it becomes a toddler, starts to move around and think and understand, but til then, Edgar lies. When he asks how the baby is, he is lying, because he doesn’t really care. Nonchalance has become yet another a terrible habit of his, but he doesn’t get enough sleep to fully interact with babies, siblings, or life in general.

          He stays up at night, has a little cry, wishes he’d gone to bed before midnight, counts on his fingers how many hours sleep he could get if he went to bed right now, does the dishes, turns off the switches, changes, carefully picks out a CD to listen to his sleep, notices a book he wants to read, reads a few pages, reads until a few pages turns into finishing the book, changes the CD, regrets not going to sleep back when he first regretted not going to sleep, counts again how soon before his alarm clock goes off, lies awake in bed for a bit, wonders what time it is, gets up and checks what time it is, changes the CD, hates himself for a while, and then goes to sleep.

          Technically Edgar is unwell. He isn’t doing well in his job, in his personal world, and frankly, he is losing at life. Paul repeatedly tells him this. Edgar loses at life, and Paul wins. Some lose, some win, and that’s the game, so says Paul. Edgar shakes his head and internally announces that Paul is an idiot, and every cell in his body agrees. This is an act of frustration mainly. Edgar doesn’t hate Paul, he thinks he is a doof, but generally he doesn’t really care about Paul. He doesn’t know that Paul once paid his girlfriend to abort their child, or that Paul’s dad is dying and Paul wishes he would die first so he wouldn’t have to watch his father shrink and forget and cry tears of confusion and frustration when he didn’t recognise his son and couldn’t remember any words to tell him this. Nobody knows this except Paul and for the first part, the girlfriend, and for the second part, presumably Paul’s father, except he is trapped inside aphasia and may not remember, although he knows, so perhaps we shouldn’t presume either.

          Maybe if Edgar knew, he would care, although that cannot be guaranteed, but since Edgar is not some inhuman beast, it is suggested that some forced or feigned sympathy would emerge as a response, but he doesn’t know. Edgar is too focussed on whether he really is losing at life to look into Paul’s eyes and unlock some uncharted sorrow there in a most homoerotic finish to this voyeuristic escapade into their lives, probably because such a look doesn’t exist. People put more faith in eyes than they deserve, Edgar believes. Nobody could read Edgar’s eyes. No one could tell they brimmed with tears but two hours before. But if Edgar is losing at life, so is Paul. And everybody else, come to think of it. Everybody loses at life eventually, so everyone is on equal ground in that sense. So, in a more positive view, let us say everyone wins at life, and then celebrate.

          Of course, perhaps the only person who wins at life is Paul’s father, from the confines of his mind. There might be something in his eyes, maybe only when they close for the last time. But we can’t be sure of such mystical silliness. If you care enough to think about life, you might realise it doesn’t make enough sense for you to care so much, so perhaps let us write whichever final sentence we choose and pretend that our choice doesn’t matter, if it will get us from the beginning to the end. That way we can claim to win.



                                        Goodnight, Edgar; Goodnight Paul.