![]() For the next seven hours the television ran through its cycle of reruns and commercials. In the company of this manmade beauty, stacked high and low around me, my young life gained a lofty, transported quality that was matched only in later years by wandering cast-aside rooms in the museums of New York City, or around the city’s streets, or driving without purpose through American towns. I had stopped going to school, and so a good number of my daytime hours were spent in the libraries of Las Vegas, lingering especially in the sections where the heavy art books were kept. I kept a stack of library books beside me on a wooden tray, along with a multi-volume encyclopedia with illustrations of countries that no longer existed, my Third Edition of Roget’s International Thesaurus, and a notebook. This room, the family room, had become, by that time, the emptiest room of all. The television played continuously at a low volume it was the only light in the house. At 10:00 pm, I sat in the fat, tan recliner that faced the television and turned the TV on. In the sprawling ranch house on University Circle ten minutes from the Las Vegas Strip that I had lived in all my life-with its chocolate-brown, wall-to-wall carpet and long hallway-I would finish my dinner and put my dishes in the sink. Between ten and six I kept myself in a state of sleeplessness not to uncover the mystery of night’s puzzles, but to find out what really happens in the liminal space that is the passage from night to day. Stars lighted the yard behind my house and I was lit by the television screen that flickered as long as the stars did. The desert, so blinding under the sun, is, when lit up by stars and moon, easier to see. If you’ve seen the desert at night then you know that this is true. The yard behind my house in Las Vegas and the desert beyond were more vivid than in the busy light of day. The pm hours are the worldly hours, but when I was a teenager, the time between roughly 10:00 pm and 6:00 am became my true day. I slept for a few hours and woke at noon, and, in this way, when I opened my eyes I was immediately in the pm hours, the time most people think of as “day,” the efficient, practical, useful hours. I stayed awake into the early am, until just before sunrise, when I allowed myself to sleep. To erase the morning, I had to stretch the night. ![]() Morning would pass over my house and I could stay hidden inside. Then one day (of course it never happens like this, but let’s say it did) it occurred to me I could escape morning entirely. Even at this young age I was already suffering morning’s burdens. Y ears ago, when I was fourteen, I began to erase the morning.
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