killing time softly

Lately Otto has been waking up with insomnia. The other night he woke up at 4 and lay in bed sleepless until almost 8. Waking up with insomnia is not as bad as going to bed with it. Thoughts tailing dreams float, but chasing sleep they rush breathlessly, repeatedly tripping on jagged stones of panic. Insomnia is a disease of the lustfull.

When Otto awoke with insomnia this morning, he was relieved to see that it was already 7:30, when normal people were already up, he thought. He knew that if he got up then he would be tired all day, but with luck it would be dazeful and pleasant, like the empty stare of a fat old woman sitting on her front step following the whole world shuffle by.

By 10 he had finished all the work he had wanted to do for the day and then wondered if it was too early to go have his hair cut. Remembering that he still had to shower and dress offered unusual relief, even though Otto always overestimated the time that would take. In Otto's mind, radical transitions gulped down time much more ravenously than, for instance, stupor. And what worse sequence of transitions did one suffer everyday than going from being clothed to naked, dry to wet to dry again, and then clothed again? Otto never knew whether in the end he would be, like after his afternoon coffee, invigorated or exhausted.

As Otto was going down the stairs in his building, he wondered whether the barbers would still be too sleepy to concentrate on his hair. Ever since hearing once that later in the day barbers become sloppy from fatigue, he's never had his hair cut after 2:30 in the afternoon. But in Berlin everyone was still just waking up at lunch time, and it was precisely in the very late afternoon that people started to get in the swing of things. He remembered mornings where his hands were too heavy to heave up over the keyboard. In the courtyard unlocking his bike, Otto told himself he was too tired now to think about things like that.

Once done with the haircut, Otto looked at his watch and was disappointed. The small Vietnamese place nearby where he wanted to have a hot noodle soup was still closed for another fifty minutes. He remembered that on the way was a photo automat, somewhere in the intersecting tunnels of an U-Bahn station, where he needed to have his photo taken. Suddenly, however, Otto felt tired and cold, and the idea of navigating through the commuting crowds rushing in different directions at all angles seemed impossible. On the other hand, he told himself, he would have to go for the photos sometime within the next two days in any case, he would literally be passing over the automat, and he had time to kill.

When Otto got to the automat, he was surprised to see that someone was already in it. Not wanting to pressure her to hurry, he walked away, first toward nothing in particular, then, feeling as if he were attracting the attention of the drug addicts and alcoholics, to a large map of the city. The map of the city was much more interesting than the U-bahn plan, but Otto wondered what kind of person would look at it so purposefully, and he stared in the direction of the U-bahn map instead. The woman was still in the photo automat, and Otto started to think she was incompetent. Finally, she got out and took her photos. Otto waited a moment and went to the automat, not as quickly as to seem he was waiting, but quickly enough to get there before someone else.