IN BED that night, however, I couldn’t sleep at all. Rain was falling, and the roof was leaking. It wasn’t leaking any longer in the spot from which drops fell on my head; now it was leaking in two other places. I could hear a drip in the corner to my left, near the window on my side of the bed, and I could hear another drip, or perhaps an echo of the first drip, in the corner diagonally opposite it. A drop would fall on my left, and a moment later a drop would fall on my right. When one is lying in bed between the extremes of a bipolar drip like that, one’s thoughts tend to arrange themselves in bipolar patterns: call and response, question and answer, either-or, wet-dry, being and nothingness — to the man who is lying somewhere between drip and drop, all of these are variations on that theme.
Because I had learned that a little bit of “Baldy’s Nightcap” was the antidote for most kinds of egocentric thinking, I expected it to work for this man-in-the-middle type, too. I stuck my earphone in my ear and switched my radio on, but the show was already over, and Baldy was, I suppose, asleep.
[to be continued]
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