Destroy All Monsters

Around midnight, unable to fall asleep, I abandon my bed to sit at my desk, an oak escritoire facing my apartment’s western windows. Lying on the desktop is my copy of Tom Jones, which I was reading earlier this evening. Now I sit with it again, trying to pick up where I left off. But I find that although I am not tired enough to sleep, I am still too tired to read, so I put down the paperback and recrease a flimsy page corner to keep my place. (I have reached the seventh chapter of the fifth book, when Allworthy, Tom Jones’s adoptive father, is convalescing on his sickbed. The last sentences I’ve underlined are those that Allworthy speaks to the friends gathered around him, whom he admonishes not to fear his death, for, he assures them, he has taken pains to spiritually prepare himself for it, unlike most men. ‘[I]ndeed,’ he aphorizes, ‘few men think of death till they are in its jaws. However gigantic and terrible an object this may appear when it approaches them, they are nevertheless incapable of seeing it at any distance’—‘Yes!’ I have written in the margin.) Giving up on Tom Jones, I stare out the two tall windows that overlook the backyard. But all that’s visible in the blackened glass is the reflection of my own sleepless face. Or rather I should say that my face is visible beyond the blackened glass: the image of my face, though technically reflected on or in the glass, has an odd and ghostly depth to it, so that what my face really appears to be doing is hovering about three or four feet beyond, levitating outside my window in midair. My face floats hugely where the wide backyard should be. The reflection incorporates not only my image, but also the distance at which I sit from the window—a space the breadth of my desk. Yet while my face is all that’s visible beyond the glass, I find that I actually can make out, if I peer closely enough, any number of visual details on or in the glass. The windowpane is dirty, for example, and I can distinguish all the particles of dust lit by the mellow glow of the desk lamp: little dots of gray constellating against the blackness behind them. Occasionally, too, insects will flutteringly alight on the pane, drawn to my room, no doubt, by the false moon of the lamp’s bulb. Some of these insects I recognize, such as the large brown moth resting now on the glass, its two wings folded together like closed eyelids, balanced like a blink on its thin legs (I say that it is resting ‘now’ because, just a moment before, it was beating its wings in stationary flight beyond the window, not far from where my own face still floats, effortlessly). But most of the insects that alight on the window—aside from the moth, I mean—I don’t recognize at all, couldn’t identify if I tried; they remain entomologically ambiguous, just these little splinters with legs.