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[thene]

d:eletion: THE INSOMNIA FAIRY
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I'd known Ascott, tentatively, for a few years before she told me she wanted in. I asked her why. The idea of sharing dreams with her made my heart twist. She said she hoped it would cure her insomnia.

Yeah, I know. I told her. Repeatedly. Sharing dreams for fun and profit is a cause of insomnia - most of us can't even dream naturally any more. She said she needed to try it anyway, and I caved and said she could come with me, just once, just then. She was like a sore I couldn't stop picking at; I wanted to know what sharing subconsciousness with her felt like. I wanted to know what she'd feel if she shared in my subconsciousness, as if I wanted her to solve me.

(I have always expected too much from her, way more than there realistically could be.)

We settled into armchairs right there in my flat on Avenue Road, and came to in a front garden I'd made up. We wandered a London I'd made up, a London in stormy June where the M4 flyover soared over a dense knot of trees. We walked past lush front gardens, from the ornamental to the overgrown, the buildings behind them diminished. The city's green spaces crowded together, bleeding over the confines of their real-world existence. Flowers flowed over the edges of basket junctions. Streets seemed like canalside towpaths, shimmered with light and a film of water.

None of it's a lie, in essence. It's the way he always saw the city, in miles-long walks from park to park. Ascott wandered open-eyed, splashing up puddles in her running shoes. I prompted her to small manipulations, and watched, brain stinging, as she twisted a rollercoaster loop in the flyover. Cars drove upside-down on her version of what was real. I could see the pleasure she took in making that possible.

She turned to me, proud of shaking up me and my little green dream, and she looked past me and through me and her face changed, like she'd seen the bad weather. I heard thunder seconds later, and I felt the space behind me like an emptiness with air rushing into it, rattling the overgrown city.

She spoke like words could stop it, explain the gaps away. "I've done this before. Figured you'd know." Back when she was in the army - that was how they trained soldiers these days, right? She snorted. "They say that. I figure it's the same reason they used to give grunts LSD and Ecstasy. They needed test subjects, and we needed some illusory version of -" The flyover uncoiled, laying itself flat above Brentford again "- freedom. Everyone wins."

The storm-breeze brushed past us, and I felt her smoke-taste for the first time, an anxious twinge of habit. If we'd been in the real world she'd be heading to the window to light up and pretend she hadn't just said what she'd had to say. She had, and I'd heard it, and I felt angry just thinking about it, a choked and stupid feeling that means as little as I do. Test subjects for what?

Is this why she can't sleep? "No. Couldn't sleep before that, either." She looked at me - past me - again, and walked on. "So, this is your subconscious?" I nodded. "They used to screen people - told us that some of us had things down there that the rest of us wouldn't want to share." She slipped twitchy fingers into pockets. I decided she needed a totem.

Did she - was there something inside her that got seen and screened out and made her sleepless and desperate to return? "No. You can't screen out what's not there."

My foot caught in a pothole in the pavement and I stumbled, scrabbled a moment to escape the - not me I hadn't put it there hadn't taken it away - feeling of stepping on nothing. She glanced at me over her shoulder and she saw it. I saw it. The moment yawned open between our eyes. Don't look, don't sleep, keep your eyes level and open because it's either that or look down and dream alone. Don't ever look down.

You can't see loss, or missed steps or loneliness. It's the negative space in the level. A rest in the soundtrack. An eye in the storm, and sometimes - at the best of times - there's this sensation you can find if you dream deeply with someone, a moment of mutual understanding where a dreamer and a subject can look at each other's contributions and see their meaning become clear, and you can't have that if all you're capable of seeing is what you both don't have. You -



It was all surface-level, no sedation. If I'd been sedated when that feeling had come over me, I would have dived. To hell with making her think I was a safe person to share dreams with. She already knew, and she didn't care. Still doesn't. That's why she keeps me sane.



I think we woke up when the pavement collapsed. I'll admit to being hazy on this point. She grinned and went out to the back steps for a smoke, and I spent the next few minutes playing with my totem, trying to confirm, in the patterns of grooves and the coil of the spiral, that I was awake now and what hadn't just happened, hadn't just happened. She'd seen through the cracks in my head and offered neither pity nor rejection. As if she knows what it's like to define something by its absence.

No matter how many times I turned it, the corkscrew could not prove that she cared. That's totems and their solipsism; I can't even prove she exists, only that the person holding this totem exists; and as long as this totem stays the same, you can keep real. They have no other revelatory powers.

Ascott returned. She sat down in the chair next to mine, and I smelt rain-damp tobacco - I could feel it getting dark outside, easing into autumn night. I looked at her, wondering what she was thinking. "You still miss him," she said simply.

"Yes." Equally simple. Years since I'd said it, years since anyone asked - they all knew, but any discussion on the subject was long since over. (Ascott's like a reminder to keep finding new friends, new audiences - constantly reintroducing yourself to others reminds you of who you really are and what it is that's really wrong with you and why it's okay, why it's going to be okay.)

"I can see what you get out of dreaming." It wasn't exactly a change of subject. "You thrive down there. Like you're more suited to dreams than real life."

"Are you saying I'm some kind of artiste?"

"No, I'm saying you hate reality and you hate the idea of reality." I laughed, cynical - it's true, reality marches on even when I need it not to, it concretes over lawns, it forgets the wrong things, it refuses to acknowledge my feelings. I can't stop time, and it's difficult to change the world. I passed my totem from one hand to the other. "So you laid in something to drink?"

She was kidding; I don't drink much, and she doesn't drink at all, and there's a perfectly good corkscrew in the kitchen drawer. This one didn't fold away quite as neatly; it's a long iron spiral coming perpendicular out of a handle made of antler-bone, antique and heavy, and I couldn't tell you how many places it's given me annoying scratches in; you could kill someone with this thing, which is a bonus to its intended purpose. "It's my totem."

"I've heard of those...it tells you when you're dreaming, right?"

"No, it tells me when I'm not dreaming." I only know the person holding my totem exists. "You should have it." I tossed it to her. I haven't touched it since.

She caught it by the handle, and looked at it sceptically. "I thought the whole point was that no one else knew what your totem was like."

"I can forget it, I promise. If you still want to come on deletions with me, we could call it a warm-up run."



It wasn't going to cure her insomnia, but I came to understand that it was exactly what her insomnia needed - a cause, an existence more purposeful than miserable night hours wasted alone. She couldn't beat insomnia, so needed to coopt it. She tamed insomnia and turned it into her professional expertise.

Ascott got involved because I let her.



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