sleeping, pulsing, dreaming, bit by bit, meditation

You close the white laptop. Fold it like a shiny plastic wallet, with an icon of an Apple, slightly bitten off. In the darkened room a tiny pinhole of light from the right side of the machine, the right side of the thing, beats like the heart of a pristine machine in a hospital or a laboratory, no maybe a government office. No, no, it doesn't beat. It doesn't pulsate either. More like the light that a lighthouse emits, predictably, arcing and diminishing in a steady, seemingly infinite pattern. You have sent the email. You sent it, and then you flinched. Your fingers were shaking. You decided to send it. You sent it. You clicked the mouse. You shaded over the word Send so that the hand, the hand with the pointing finger, the fingerpost, appeared, a secular icon, and you clicked. (Imagine getting a shiny penny for every time that fingerpost appeared?) It gave you a certain satisfaction, that click. And with it, the whooshing, fast-train aural symbol of sendedness. A certain finality. The fingers, your fingers, weren't shaking so much anymore but you couldn't sleep. You sent it. There was no plink signifying a bounce-back of the message, the one that had your fingers trembling. When you could not sleep, you angrily removed the AA battery from the tiny clock near the bed, on the bed stand, the one you bought in postwar Berlin, postwall Berlin, to shush the ticking, the insistent tock-ticking. But the light still starlighting the room. How can such a tiny pinhole of light throw so much into shadow? But you know that even shutting it off would not grant sleep at 0154 hours. It's not the light, is it, you say. No, you don't say anything. You swirl the covers over you, like a sultan in his raiment. Is raiment a word to use here? In the machine everything lives. You can't kill it, can you? The sent email. The 3095 messages in your inbox, even if deleted. Even the send box, the trash. You can't really delete them. You know enough. You know that much. They can't really be destroyed, can they? The human imprint, gone digital, can't be scrubbed away. The palimpsest seems eternal. Who can ever grant you the sort of absolution that bathed you in purity after the priest pronounced the absolution, in Latin, his right hand forming the cross, an invisible cross, in the air? The pristine squeekiness affirmed by a steaming bath, talcum powder, clean sheets still smelling of starch and the aftermath of the hot iron, the steam iron pressed into an ironing board. Despite what they tell you, you know that it's all in there, it is real, the scores, the news, the blogs, the chatter, the porn, the tracts, the history, the dictionaries, the databases, the secrets, the proclamations, the bulls, edicts, lies, truths, connections, divorces, the photo albums, the searches, the chatter, the OMGs and LOLs. It's all there. Bubbling. Its silence is so loud. How could they tell you it is not real? Who could believe that? They said they only believed what they could see, forget about faith and gods and goddesses, and now this. It's so invisible but so loud. How could anyone sleep through such racket? And it never stops, even when you unplug it, even when you press prolongingly on the button to the upper right of your keyboard, the button that looks almost like the smile of a cyclops, the thing itching to be pressed, to an off, to a status designated as off-ness. It can never be turned off now, could it? You can never escape its buzz of on-ness, could you?