The Penguin's Song Read Online Free PDF Page A

tire my body out today. I didn’t tire out even a single body part. Not my trunk, not my limbs. I did nothing that would encourage sleep to inhabit a worn-out toe or finger, foot or hand, and then to gradually occupy the rest of my body. Nightfall makes no difference: when evening comes this body is exactly as it was in the morning. A single unchanging level of energy runs through it no matter what the time of day or night, as evenly distributed across all its parts as it is across the moments I live. A body wrapped in its singular unvarying energy, lying here in the middle of the bed, beneath the light coming from the fixture overhead. The light turns me into something almost like an invalid laid out full length beneath it, still and passive as if I’m waiting for something to be done to me—this strong light from the overhead lamp that I must turn off. I must get up and go over to the switch and flick it off. It is no longer shielding me from this wakefulness that I myself induced and stoked from the moment I began to overcome it. I have to get up and go over to the switch, even though by doing so I know I am being foolish, for I’m taking a chance that this wakefulness will seize me again, and I’m also stupidly risking the possibility that in the heavy darkness my struggle will only intensify. But I have to turn out the light. Then I collapse hurriedly into bed so that I won’t be up and about for long.
    Colliding waves follow close upon one another through my body. The wave swells and crests, and I know that inside it the pair of fighting beasts has managed to get across the bit of space that was keeping them apart. Here they are now, bodies interlocked in a ceaseless bellowing rage. They have fallen upon each other and entangled themselves; I can see them very clearly. Their thick furry hides are in plain sight, still clean in this moment before the claws bloody them. They are here in front of me even if there is no space for them to stand. Simply two beasts: alone, nothing with them, nothing surrounding them. And as the wave begins to recede, while it is still cresting, I know that I have fallen into some sort of sleep, or I have gone missing, but I know just as well that the wakefulness has vanquished me anyway.

IV
    THE OLD MIRROR THEY LUGGED here for me from our old home: why didn’t they hang it some other way, not like this, so very high up? In that room housing my bed and wardrobe, I had to step back from the mirror—back and farther back, just to see my face. Not for very long, since all I needed to do while standing at that distance was to trace the part in my hair with my comb and go over it more firmly, pulling the hair away from the comb’s path and smoothing it above and below. I still comb it this way, parting it from the roots as I first learned to do, or perhaps as I grew accustomed to doing, since I don’t remember my hair looking any other way than this, with a part. In my room here in our new home, where I both read and sleep, I can peer into the mirror from a normal distance, but only if I stand on the bed and hoist myself up to match its height. My part is still there, just as it has always been, marching the same route, but the closer I bring my head to the mirror, the more desiccated it looks: the skin is so dry that it’s flaking. The hairs around that part have grown coarse, their ends crinkling and frizzing so that from another angle of my head they give the appearance of a thick raised pad.
    Nothing about my appearance has changed. Growing a moustache has not helped me to look my age, since very little moustache hair actually appeared, and the color, which was already light, has bleached with exposure. So my moustache does not stand out from my face and adds nothing to it. No, nothing in my face has changed—not only in the time since its reflection in this same mirror when it last hung in our old home, but also from an earlier time, when I was