Everybody In This Bed Is Fine Except Me

It’s the wee dark hours of the night, which are somehow also called early morning, and I’m negotiating with a blanket.

Not a metaphor. An actual negotiation. Terms are being discussed.

Here’s where we are. The air conditioning is running. Sixty-eight degrees. I paid for that air. I paid a man named Dale to come look at the unit in May, and Dale stood in my yard for forty minutes, said “yep” twice, kicked something, and charged me two hundred and forty dollars. So this is premium air.

Artisanal air.

The house is cold now. Cold on purpose. My purpose.

Which is why I need a comforter.

Follow me here.

I made the room cold. So I got under a comforter to survive the room. But then the comforter works too well, because comforters have exactly one setting, and that setting is “sarcophagus.” So now I’m hot. In the cold room. That I paid for.

Enter the cooling sheets.

Cooling sheets, dear reader. Bamboo something. Moisture-wicking whatever. Forty-nine ninety-nine plus shipping, and the box says they’re “engineered.”

Engineered! Like a bridge. Somewhere there’s a guy with a degree and a hard hat measuring the exact temperature of my ass.

They work for about eleven minutes. Then they’re just sheets. Regular, warm, disappointed sheets.

Which is how I found out they also sell a cooling comforter.

Read that again. A cooling comforter. A blanket... engineered... to be less of a blanket. That’s a coat with air conditioning in it. That’s a sweater that apologizes.

And it’s made by the same outfit that sold me the hot one. Same company. Same catalog, twenty-four pages apart. They put the problem in the front of the book and the solution in the back, like an issue of Real Simple, a magazine that has never once made anything simple.

So I turn on the fan.

The fan makes the room cold again. Which is the thing the air conditioner was already doing. But now with a sound.

The sound is my fault. I was dusting the blades back in June, standing on the mattress, doing that slow drunk sway you do on a mattress. I started to go over. So I grabbed a blade. Put my entire body weight on a piece of faux wood the thickness of a Pop-Tart.

It held. Technically.

Now there’s a wobble. Tick. Tick. Tick. It’s the ceiling version of a guy behind you at the movies eating an apple.

So I turn on the white noise machine.

Yep. A machine that makes noise... to cover the noise... made by the machine I turned on to fight the cold that I paid for.

You know where those live? Hallways outside therapist offices. That’s the entire product. It exists so the people in the waiting room can’t hear the guy on the other side of the door crying about his mother.

I have installed the crying-concealment device in my bedroom. Voluntarily. Eighteen inches from my head.

Nobody in here is crying. Yet. But the equipment is in place.

And my feet get cold.

So I put on socks.

I’m now wearing socks... under a blanket... under a wobbling fan... next to a box impersonating a rainstorm of static... in a refrigerated house... on sheets that were engineered.

Then, around 2:40, I do the “thing.” You know the “thing.” I stick one leg out from under the covers.

That’s it. That’s the technology. Eleven hundred dollars of climate management in this room, and the whole system runs on one exposed shin. I’m a thermostat made of meat. Half in, half out, hovering at a perfect equilibrium that lasts until I move, which is immediately.

Karie is flat on her back. One arm straight up over her head, like she’s hailing a cab in a dream.

She owns no cooling products. She has never in her life said the word “wicking.” She sleeps like somebody unplugged her.

At one point I say, out loud, to a woman with a doctorate, “I think the sheets are broken.”

She says, “Mmm.”

Nine years of marriage.

Once you see it, you can’t stop seeing it. Whole concepts are built this way.

Decaf coffee. A beverage that removes the only reason for the beverage. My grandmother drank Sanka out of a jar. Sanka! Just brown water with a good attitude. Why not have soup? Have soup, Grandma. Soup wants to be there.

Non-alcoholic beer. Same aisle, more depressing. That’s a guy at a party holding a prop.

Weighted blankets. Two hundred bucks to recreate a hostage situation. “It simulates a hug.” Sure. So does a car accident.

Blackout curtains, which cost real money and turn your bedroom into a 1987 Wisconsin basement. Then, because you can no longer perceive morning, you buy a sunrise alarm clock. A lamp. A LAMP. That slowly gets brighter. To simulate the sun. That you paid to block. With curtains. That you bought.

Somewhere in America there’s a man who has spent four thousand dollars achieving a dark, quiet, cool room. He could have gotten this for free by being outside in October.

Trouble McFussbucket sleeps in mud. Full mud. She lies down in it, sighs like my father getting into a car, and she’s out.

She’s up to 163 pounds, by the way. She says it’s the barometric pressure. I say it’s the corn. We’ve agreed not to litigate it.

Remmi sleeps wherever she stops walking. Vinny Van Meow sleeps on the one warm laptop in the house, which is mine, which is open, which is how I’ve now got 900 pages of the letter B in a document. Professor Archibald Pickles sleeps under a lampshade like a small Scandinavian mistake.

Not one of them has a strategy. Not one of them is awake at 3 a.m. doing thermal math.

Señor Hector Queso Suarez DDS would shiver in a hoodie at all times, but that chihuahua shivers at brunch, so he’s not evidence of anything.

It’s 3:20 now. Fan ticking. Radioactive Rainstorm box going. Comforter on. Cooling sheets, allegedly, cooling. Socks. One leg out. Karie hailing her dream cab.

I could just take the blanket off, raise the thermostat. I know that. I’ve known that the whole time.

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Buy me a sandwich

Brian Gerard (Lewandowski)

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