The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals - Plot & Excerpts
My father, at seventy-four years of age, still struggles with insomnia, his bedside drawer crammed with all manner of questionable cures. Like my sister, of similar temperament, he sleeps with a black gel mask over his eyes and a fan turned on, the white noise blocking the twitches and turns, the pings and guffaws of a planet that never rests. All of us Slaters are sensitive to sound. Our ears, it seems, are magnets, so the whine of a mosquito is multiplied times ten, and the low groan of the crocodile on a bank hundreds of miles away reaches us where we lay, staring at the ceiling, searching for something that cannot be found. No, you don’t find sleep. In the end it finds you, and only when you’ve ceased to scrabble after it. I have learned not to chase sleep. I have learned that, like a child or a deer, sleep will trot the other way as soon as she sees my outstretched hand. I have also learned, from all those long nights lying in bed, counting cows as they clear my moon—each one, every time—I have also learned that insomnia, at least for me, is in part a fear of precisely what I claim I long for.
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