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A woman dies. Her husband, who has nursed her throughout her long illness, is at her bedside. After realizing she has died, he thinks "Now I can sleep better." Or was it "Now I can get some sleep?"
The narrator of Sleep, the title story in this collection of 22 short works, isn't sure. Did he say that out loud or simply think it? Was it a hard thought, self-centered, selfish? What kind of a person would say or think such a thing at a time like this?
In exploring the last question, this man, like all of Dixon's obsessively introspective narrators, mulls over the circumstances of his life, both recent events and those long past. An ode to the human need for sleep, the story shows how a marriage suffers when one spouse sleeps poorly.
We use the term, "sleeping together," to describe a couple's sexual relationship. But its larger meaning sums up the trust, familiarity, and comfort of shared daily intimacy. Many married persons, like the husband in this story, value togetherness more highly than their sleep. Even though a sleep lab study shows most people sleep more restfully when they sleep alone, most couples believe the opposite to be true.
The man in Dixon's story had taken care of his wife for six years, mostly at home, each year a little more in the hospital, sleeping at her side at home, sometimes in a bed beside hers in the hospital. Although it was he who insisted on sleeping in the same room, he found the noises she made disturbing. Irritability, a common consequence of sleep deprivation, surfaced in barbed jokes.
"My hibernating Siberian bear--that's what you sounded like last night," he tells her. "I'm not laughing," she replies. "It should be obvious I can't help it."
"I get anxious every night I go to sleep, thinking I won't get any rest for the next day," he tells her. "Sleep in the other room," she responds, and when he demurs, "put up with it best you can."
In the last days of her illness, in the hospital, her labored breathing kept him from sleeping in her room. The couch in the visitors' lounge was not designed for sleeping, "which," he thinks, "might have been what the hospital had in mind when they bought it."
The night she dies, he spends at the funeral home, sitting by her coffin. It's quiet, of course, but he can't sleep there. At the funeral the next day, as the officiator drones on, he nearly dozes. Back at home, shades pulled, he fixes a drink, and reads his wife's obituary. After three days of near constant wakefulness, he gets in bed. He is free to sleep, but his thoughts keep churning.
The phone rings. It is his wife. "You can't believe how great I feel," she tells him. With this, says Dixon, "he knows he's already asleep."
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