Throughout the winter Rabih works on designs for a gymnasium. He meets a dozen times with the members of the local education authority who are commissioning it. It promises to be an exceptional building, with a system of skylights which will make it bright inside even on the dullest days. Professionally speaking, it may be the beginning of something very substantial for him. And then, in the spring, they call him back in and, in that aggressive manner sometimes adopted by people who feel so guilty about letting someone down that they become offensive, bluntly tell him it’s off—and that they’ve decided to go with another practice with more experience. That’s when the not-sleeping begins.
Insomnia can, when it goes on for weeks, be hell. But in smaller doses—a night here and there—it doesn’t always need a cure. It may even be an asset, a help with some key troubles of the soul. Crucial insights that we need to convey to ourselves can often be received only at night, like city church bells that have to wait until dark to be heard.
During the day he has to be dutiful towards others. Alone in the den, past midnight, he can return to a bigger, more private duty. His thought processes would no doubt sound weird to Kirsten, Esther, and William. They need him to be a certain way, and he doesn’t want to let them down or scare them with the strangeness of his perceptions; they have a right to benefit from his predictability. But there are now other, inner demands on his attention. Insomnia is his mind’s revenge for all the tricky thoughts he has carefully avoided during the daylight hours.
Ordinary life rewards a practical, unintrospective outlook. There’s too little time and too much fear for anything else. We let ourselves be guided by an instinct for self-preservation: we push ourselves forwards, strike back when we’re hit, turn the blame onto others, quell stray questions, and cleave closely to a flattering image of where we’re headed. We have little option but to be relentlessly on our own side.
Only at those rare moments when the stars are out and nothing further will be needed from us until dawn can we loosen our hold on our ego for the sake of a more honest and less parochial perspective.
He looks at the familiar facts in a new way: he is a coward, a dreamer, an unfaithful husband, and an overly possessive, clingy father. His life is held together by string. He is over halfway through his career, and he has achieved next to nothing in comparison with the hopes that were once placed on him.
He can, at three a.m., be oddly unsentimental in listing his faults: a willful streak that provokes distrust in his superiors, a tendency to get offended too easily, a preference for caution based on a terror of rejection. He has not had the self-confidence to stick with things. By his age, others have gone ahead and set up their own architectural practices instead of waiting to be asked and then blaming the world for not begging hard enough. There is precisely one building—a data-storage facility in Hertfordshire—with his name on it. He is on track to die with the largest parts of his talent still unexploited, registering as mere flashes of inspiration that he occasionally perceives out of the corner of his mind’s eye while he’s in the shower or driving alone down the motorway.
At this point he is beyond self-pity, the shallow belief that what has happened to him is rare or undeserved. He has lost faith in his own innocence and uniqueness. This isn’t a midlife crisis; it’s more that he is finally, some thirty years too late, leaving adolescence behind.
He sees he is a man with an exaggerated longing for Romantic love who nevertheless understands little about kindness and even less about communication. He is someone afraid of openly striving for happiness who takes shelter in a stance of preemptive disappointment and cynicism.
So this is what it is to be a failure. The chief characteristic may be silence: the phone doesn’t ring, he isn’t asked out, nothing new happens. For most of his adult life he has conceived of failure in the form of a spectacular catastrophe, only to recognize at last that it has in fact crept up on him imperceptibly through cowardly inaction.
Yet, surprisingly, it’s okay. One gets used to everything, even humiliation. The apparently unendurable has a habit of coming to seem, eventually, not so bad.
He has already sucked too much of life’s bounty, without particular profit and to no good effect. He has been on the earth for too many decades; he has never had to till the soil or go to bed hungry, yet he has left his privileges largely untouched, like a spoilt child.
His dreams were once very grand indeed: he would be another Louis Kahn or Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe or Geoffrey Bawa. He was going to bring a new kind of architecture into being: locally specific, elegant, harmonious, technologically cutting-edge, progressive.
Instead he is the almost-broke deputy director of a second-rate urban-design firm, with a single building—more of a shed, really—to his name.
Nature embeds in us insistent dreams of success. For the species, there must be an evolutionary advantage in being hardwired for such striving; restlessness has given us cities, libraries, spaceships.
But this impulse doesn’t leave much opportunity for individual equilibrium. The price of a few works of genius throughout history is a substantial portion of the human race being daily sickened by anxiety and disappointment.
Rabih used to assume that only the flawless version of anything was worth having. He was a perfectionist. If the car was scratched, he couldn’t enjoy driving it; if the room was untidy, he couldn’t rest; if his lover didn’t understand parts of him, the entire relationship was a charade. Now “good enough” is becoming good enough.
He notes a developing interest in certain sorts of news stories about middle-aged men. There was a guy from Glasgow who threw himself under a train, having amassed large debts and been caught out in an affair by his wife. Another drove his car into the sea near Aberdeen following some online scandal. It doesn’t, in the end, take very much, Rabih can see: just a few mistakes, and suddenly one is in the realm of catastrophe. With a few twists of the dial, with enough outside pressure, he, too, would be capable of anything. What enables him to think of himself as sane is only a certain fragile chemical good fortune, but he knows he would be very much in the market for a tragedy if ever life chose to test him properly.
At those times when he is neither fully awake nor quite asleep but traveling through the interstitial zones of consciousness, at two or three a.m., he feels how many images and stray memories his mind holds, all waiting to come to his attention when the rest of the static has receded: glimpses of a trip to Bangkok eight years before, the surreal view of villages in India after a night squashed against an airplane window; the cold tiled bathroom floor in the house his family lived in in Athens; the first snowfall he ever experienced, on a holiday in eastern Switzerland; the low grey sky observed on a walk across fields in Norfolk; a corridor leading towards a swimming pool at university; the night spent with Esther in hospital when they operated on her finger. . . . The logic of some things may fade, but none of the images ever really go away.
During his sleepless nights, he occasionally thinks about and misses his mother. He wishes with embarrassing intensity that he might be eight again and curled up under a blanket with a slight fever and that she could bring him food and read to him. He longs for her to reassure him about the future, absolve him of his sins, and comb his hair neatly into a left-sided parting. He is at least mature enough to know there is something important which ought to resist immediate censorship in these regressive states. He can see that he hasn’t, despite the outward signs, come very far.
He realizes that anxiety will always dog him. It may appear that each new wave of it is about this or that particular thing—the party where he won’t know many people, the complicated journey he has to make to an unfamiliar country, a dilemma at work—but, considered from a broader perspective, the problem is always larger, more damning, and more fundamental.