The Film Director’s Insomnia

John Talbird

At night I can’t sleep, so I walk the house, look out the windows at our upper class suburban neighborhood, the darkened homes surrounding us, the moths batting at the perpetually lit bulbs on their front porches. Occasionally, I walk into my kids’ rooms to watch them sleep. Now and then, I sit on the edge of my bed with a peanut butter sandwich and glass of milk, the glowing television on the bureau silent, and watch my wife sleep. She slumbers on her back, mouth slightly open. If I were to lean close, I would hear her snore although she insists that she doesn’t. Sometimes, when we have guests, I will even walk into their room and watch these strangers having their dreams.

We have many guests, as my wife loves to entertain and we have a spacious home in the country, a refuge of sorts from city life. This evening, we have a couple staying, Tony and Joanna Roberts. After the dinner of Cornish hen and broccoli rabe, a few bottles of a very good Sauvignon blanc, Joanna blurted that Tony is infertile, that they respect me so much as a person, as a specimen of manhood—yes! she really said that—and they just need some sperm. There’s nothing but trouble and desire. Just when I think our life has finally achieved a fragile calm, someone bursts into our bower wanting something, upsetting the cart and dispelling peace. I can’t help but wonder if there are end credits, any final score, any happily ever after in our future.

But there is no “us” to this story. I know the future, I have seen it: I will be the last man on Earth, tracing out his days on the burnt husk of this former green and blue globe. That’s why I hesitate in volunteering my sperm, my seed, the grain of my image, not because of vague legal or filial entanglements or even because the world is going to hell in a hand basket. It is and that’s beside the point. Why help create someone new, someone made from my stuff, who will eventually, quite soon, in fact, abandon me like all the rest?

I have learned of the Earth’s destruction, not from scientists or politicians or preachers or any other snake oil salesmen, but from angels who have come to our house to speak to me in the middle of the night when I cannot sleep. Gabriel preaches in the library, Michael stares from the bathroom mirror as I brush my teeth, and Fred intones while I eat my third bowl of cold cereal. When the sky is clear I can see the twinkling 24-hour glow of L.A. in the distance, the supposed “City of Angels,” but there are no angels there. Instead, they tread the floors of my ten thousand-square-foot home, hover near the ceiling, float beneath the aqua tints of my night-lit swimming pool. Although they speak in hymn and riddle, in tongues and chant, the message is clear: Soon there will be no one. No one but me.

I walk through our cavernous eggshell white rooms, bare feet cool on marble floor, and regard the Kirlian photographs I’ve taken of my visitors engaged in their nighttime exercises. These blue and red glowing images that I’ve captured, my wife insists are nothing more than the anthropomorphic auras of the daytime bodies of our kids and guests ensconced in their beds like sensible humans while I make my nighttime peregrinations. These wraithlike figures echo the screensaver in the living room which flashes images from digital newspapers that correspond with those on the muted television and today’s paper spread out on the kitchen table: protests turning to riot, burnt effigies and bodies, militants praying and loading automatic weapons, civilians painting dumb and docile animals with peace symbols and flags, sowing seeds in patterns of logo. People weep and sternly pontificate. Androids, a new ethnicity muddying the melting pot, join the fight, often quite viciously, for their rights.

I step from our brightly lit white house out onto the nighttime porch, crickets singing, neighbors’ lights twinkling. If I look just right, I can see the ghostly outlines of the girders from the buildings that want to be built, the corporate entities that want to take root in this nearly virgin soil. Before that happens, the world will end and I will stand on this mountain top looking down on it all, wondering what to do with my life now that there is no one to watch my films.

John Talbird is the author of the chapbook, A Modicum of Mankind (Norte Maar). His novel The World Out There will be released in the summer of 2020 by Madville Publishing, and his fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Apalachee Review, Ploughshares, Grain, Juked, Potomac Review and North Dakota Quarterly among many others. He is a frequent contributor to Film International, on the editorial board of Green Hills Literary Lantern, and Associate Editor, Fiction, for the noir online journal Retreats from Oblivion. A professor at Queensborough Community College-CUNY, he lives with his wife in New York City.