I went down to the men’s room. Slanted over the urinal, accompanied by the soft hum of the perpetual waters, a little flushed-faced man was singing.

“I’m an unreconstructed rebel

That’s just what I am

And for this land of freedom

I do not give a damn.”

“Shine?” said the elderly Negro attendant. I shook my head. The little flushed-faced chorister shook it and stepped away from the urinal. He was happily stoned. His accent wasn’t Southern. It was Brooklyn Irish. Upstairs the music throbbed. The happy gent didn’t tip the attendant. He had also forgotten to zip up his pants. He started to climb the marble stairs. He was going back to the music. “I hates the Yankee nation,” he sang, “that’s just what I do.” I looked at the Negro attendant. He winked. He wasn’t going to tell him either. “And I hates the Declaration—of Independence too.” We watched him disappear up the marble stairs. I thought his unzippered fly should add something to the communal merriment. I flushed the urinal, tipped the attendant, and left. I was about ready to go back to my hotel.

The one thing I still did not seem to be able to do anything about was the insomnia. I had no trouble falling asleep. That wasn’t it. But there was something frightening about the automatic way my eyes opened abruptly in the darkness of my bedroom almost every night and at, uncannily, almost the same hour. It was dark but it was morning not quite light yet and yet the night was really over. I seemed caught between an end and a beginning. What was it that awakened me? It was as though some sort of clock that I couldn’t hear tick had gone off and insisted that this was the hour for me to awake. I’d lie there and try not to think, hoping desperately that I would fall asleep again without starting to think, but the clock, invisible and without gears, which had awakened me, seemed to insist that this was exactly what I had been awakened for. I had been awakened to think. But to think of what? What was the question that needed so much answering? If I were being awakened to confront a question, why didn’t the question appear? Then I would have had a reasonable chance at an answer. But nothing came to me as I lay on the no longer comfortable pillow with the great hotel asleep and room service shut down and the life of the city itself suspended. Just the not being able to return to sleep and the not wishing to read and the dislocation of objects in the dark. Toward morning, when the light was actual, and I could hear the first trucks below, the necessity of answering the question I couldn’t phrase for myself would seem to leave me and I’d fall asleep, and during the day itself the shadow of those insomniac hours would wear thin and disappear.

About three o’clock, the next afternoon, I heard the key in the lock again. Clutching her law books, Aurora came into the suite. She looked even paler. She put the law books down and opened her purse. She took out the check I had given her the day before. She put the check down wordlessly on the writing desk next to the album of my photographs.