I couldn’t stand up, I couldn’t walk around, I couldn’t rest, I couldn’t eat properly. I stayed in one spot, now squatting on my haunches, now stretched out on my back, now with my legs knotted into the Yoga lotus posture. I grew increasingly hot, hungry, bored, and uncomfortable with the passage of time. At the beginning I had been afraid they would kill me. Now I was beginning to fear that they wouldn’t.

It might not have been so bad if I could have slept. But when I was eighteen years old, a piece of North Korean shrapnel had been rudely deposited in my brain, and in the course of this, something called my sleep center had been destroyed. Medical science is not entirely certain what the sleep center is or what it does. Mine isn’t, and whatever it once did, it no longer does; consequently I have not slept in seventeen years.

All in all, I’ve found this more an advantage than not. In addition to bringing me a $112 government disability check every month, my insomnia leaves me with that many more hours per day to get things done, obviates the necessity for hotel rooms while traveling, and otherwise enhances life.

But sleep, in addition to being sore labor’s bath, healer of life’s wounds, the death of each day’s life, and all the other things Macbeth called it, is also a handy time-waster to ease one through stretches of excruciating boredom. My trek through the jungle had been sufficiently exhausting to tire me considerably, and but for that shred of shrapnel, I would probably have spent half my caged hours in blissful unconsciousness.

Instead I stayed awake.

I have never had so little to do. During the first day I tried to attract attention by making noise. I called out now and then in Siamese, which I speak moderately well, and in Khmer, which I don’t. No one ever went so far as to answer me, but I found that whenever I made any noise, someone came over and raised one side of the cage, thus sending me sprawling over to the other side. After each utterance of mine, regardless of pitch or language or content, had been similarly rewarded, I learned my lesson. I stopped talking.