Then it was four in the morning, and he said he had to go home. She told him he could sleep there. But he couldn’t, he said, sitting up and pulling on his jeans. He couldn’t fall asleep with someone else in the bed. When she expressed surprise, his face darkened. “No one likes it,” he said, as if a referendum had been held and the results decisive. When his wife left him for another man, she’d told him that it was because the other man held her as they fell asleep. Of course there had been other reasons for her dissatisfaction, too. When she finally admitted that she was in love with someone else and was going to leave the German Boxer, she did it by phone, and during the conversation he took notes so that he wouldn’t forget anything. These he took down on the endpapers of Ghosts by Daylight, a memoir by a journalist on her twenty years of reporting from war zones. And at the top of the list, underlined twice: the fact that he had been unable to hold his wife through the night.

It wasn’t that he didn’t wish he could sleep next to someone, he told her now. He simply couldn’t find any peace that way. He remained alert, on edge, and so it could take him hours to fall asleep, a problem that was exacerbated by the fact that he knew that if he didn’t get enough sleep, he was likely to get a migraine. He had been getting migraines since he was thirteen. They arrived with an aura that blacked out parts of his vision, and when they came the only thing he could do was curl up in a fetal position until they passed. Though it was impossible to say exactly what caused them, he was certain that lack of sleep was a factor, and so sleep had become of paramount importance. Only when he was alone did he feel at peace, and then he fell asleep moments after his head touched the pillow. It had been like that always, he told her. The last time he could remember sleeping well with someone next to him was when he was five, and had asked his mother to sit by the bed and hold his hand. But he still remembered the serenity of that, the goodness. And yet, whenever the German Boxer spoke of the unhappiness his inability had caused his wife and other women since her, his tone became frustrated and resentful: Why couldn’t they understand that it was bad for him to share a bed? That it caused him to suffer?