Red Savina Review Issue 2.2

somehow forget they were back there, behind the iris in the ceiling, cracking jokes about farts and night wood, watching me toss and turn and scratch and sigh and curse. I just had to forget all that, and fall asleep.

Easy as– The intercom clicked back on. The technician apologized, but could I breathe through my nose again?

I breathed through my nose. A minute went by, a minute and a half, maybe. The door opened.

The technician apologized, but he had to make an adjustment. He flicked the fluorescent lights back on, went to the switchboard, switched a few wires, apologized again, turned the lights back off, stepped outside.

I waited a few minutes, expecting more commands, but the intercom stayed quiet this time.

I was wide awake, probably more awake than I’d been in a long time. This made me nervous, which made my heart rate increase, which I’m sure they noticed, which made me even more nervous, and so on and so on. I wondered how well they could see me from that eye with the red pin-hole lights. I wondered how many times they’d watched someone lie in bed with their eyes wide open the whole night. I hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in months, but I feared that tonight of all nights I might sleep right through. I would look like a full-on hypochondriac, or some sort of elaborate exhibitionist.

For the next hour I tried different tricks to take my mind off the whole business. I tried picturing my brainwaves decreasing in activity, hoping to will them from alpha to theta, from rocky crags to rolling foothills. This actually had the opposite effect (no doubt noted by the technician). I became acutely aware of my surroundings, acutely aware of being observed, and as my awareness increased, so did my indignation at the whole situation. I felt more and more that this observation (which objectively wasn’t all thatterrible, really) was an intrusion upon nothing less than the most private thing imaginable i.e. my very thoughts themselves, and the notion that all this was supposedly for my benefit seemed a fairly transparent justification for what was actually an enormous, medically sanctioned perversion (inter-cranial voyeurism, being my diagnosis). This riled me to such an extent that I knew it would be impossible to sleep should I carry on with this line of thought, and while the idea of being watched while I slept was indeed