The sleep center is a clever little rascal that makes you sleep. Doctors don’t know much about it, except that this is what it does, and that everyone has one. Except me, that is. I don’t have one, and consequently I don’t sleep.

This is mostly good, I think. I get a disability pension from the government in the amount of $112 a month. (I don’t know where they got the figure, or how.) And I have time to do all the things that people don’t have time for. Like learning languages (once you’ve learned eight or ten, the rest get very easy) and getting involved with political causes (like the return of the House of Stuart to the English throne, or the restoration of Cilician Armenia, or the propagation of the beliefs of the Flat Earth Society, or the destruction of the white supremacist government of Modonoland, or, oh, lots of things). When you stop to think about it, eight hours out of twenty-four is a lot of time to waste on nothing more interesting than unconsciousness.

But there are times when being awake is not that much of a joy. There are times, in truth, when the raveled sleeve of care could use a little knitting up.

This was one of them.

And it went on and on and on, until I felt that time simply could not be passing this slowly. Obviously I had lost my sense of time. I had also lost my sense of humor, and I only wished I could lose my sense of smell in the bargain, because the air holes in the casket facilitated a certain amount of seepage, and, not to put too fine a point on it, that casket was no bed of roses.

Until finally I heard footsteps, heard them very clearly through all that earth, and they came closer and closer, just a single set of footsteps, and a voice shouted out my name.