How to Serve a Proper Mate

Don’t set your alarm. Plan on sleeping in, as late as possible. “The longer, the better,” you tell yourself as you switch off the lamp on the nightstand, as if it were a question of will.

Wake up, nonetheless, after a few short hours, still night. Don’t reach for your phone. Don’t check the hour. If you do, it’s all over. You can forget about falling back asleep. Once your mind is back on the hamster wheel, there will be nothing to stop it from turning, nothing to stop the axle from creaking and chirping.

So, just pull gently on the reins. Push the thoughts away. Focus instead on your limbs. On how heavy they are. Dead weight, they sink all the way down to the bottom on the mattress, all the way down to the bedframe even, the skiff that will take you to the other shore, to morning, provided you can weather the storm.

Your eyes will itch. There is little question of that. Imagine how many images you consume throughout the day. They have been swarming in there for hours now, cacophonous, furious, bellicose. It is time to let them out. Feel the black smoke, the soot, streaming from your eyes into the room. Allow it swirl in the air above the bed and settle finally over your body like a mist, a dense mist, a protective layer perhaps, a blanket of sorts.

This fog is also your weariness, physical but also so much more than that, also another kind of exhaustion, cumulative, years in the making. Your muscles and tissues are steeped in it. You drag it around with you like a public bus trails ribbons of exhaust on the pavement. It tinges your overall outlook, jaundice, jaded jettisoned. It’s time to let some of that go. A little bit at a time. It’s time to let it seep out.

Lift anchor and float out into the deep waters, the broad swells, where the sea is calm and clement. Allow yourself to drift. Relinquish control.

Source: Ounce Dice Trice (1958), written by Alastair Reid and illustrated by Ben Shahn

Don’t pay attention to that noise, beneath everything else, a low roaring, tiny at first but growing louder, closer, more ferocious, more difficult to dismiss. Is it the waves crashing on the shore? A bonfire perhaps? Shoo it away now that it is upon you, now that it is nipping at your heels. Do not try to make sense of it, the noise. Do not respond to its provocations. Its presence in the room causes to air to stir. It dissipates the mist and ruffles the hem of the curtains in its attempt to engage you. Don’t feel interpellated, despite its insistence, despite its proximity, despite its intensity.

Hold out as long as you can. All it takes is one word. Once the undifferentiated wall of sound, monolithic, breaks apart into its constituent parts, into its discrete units, into its propositions and syntagmas and words, there is no turning back. So concentrate on the static, resist the image that is coming into focus.

“Low key.” You didn’t go looking for the phrase. Rather, it came looking for you, sniffed you out in your hiding place, your mist, your sleeping bag on the dirty mattress at The Halfway House.

And, now that it found you, there is no way of arresting the chain of associations, the interminable deferral of one signifier to the next to the next and so on. Once mounted, you gallop from the phrase to the dialogue to the setting to the scene to the act to the play to the tragedy of it all, wind in your hair.

Earlier in the day, at the beginning of your shift, you were engaging in small talk with one of your co-workers when the phrase slipped out. You hadn’t planned on saying it. Distracted, enthused, empathetically unsettled by your interlocutor perhaps, you proffered the words. Low. Key.  

Little by little, you have been growing accustomed to the dialect of your co-workers, overpopulated with expressions like no cap and slay and low key. On occasion, you have felt the temptation to appropriate one of these neologisms and smuggle it into one of your own enunciations. Understanding the stakes, however, you had successfully avoided this mistake, a misfire. Until today.

Week by week, the days have been growing longer. Winter has reached the point at which incremental quantitative shifts have culminated in a qualitative change. The midwinter slump is now over. Today, for the first time this year, it was still light out when you arrived at The Community Center for the closing shift. There was still a remainder of light in the floor-to-ceiling windows, however tenuous.

The realization, perhaps, had you in an exalted state. Upon encountering Lincoln at the front desk, you pointed to the window and exclaimed that you were “low key thrilled” about this development. Lincoln’s eyes grew wide. He took a small step back.

Almost instantly, you could feel the blood rush to your cheeks. Inventing a pretext, you scurried back to the supply closet, ashamed. There is a good chance, of course, that you did not use the expression properly, which is bad enough, but there is something more at play, something considerably more disturbing. You violated the maxim of sincerity upon which such conversational exchanges depend. To any observer, it would have seemed like you were trying to pass for something that you are not, that is, a young person. And there is nothing more disreputable, nothing more lacking in dignity than a middle-aged person trying to conceal their age.

Throw back the covers. Sit bolt upright in bed. There is no use in fighting it at this point. Now that the adrenaline has hit your bloodstream, now that you are cataloguing all the stupid things you said or did throughout the day, now that you have given free rein to your superego to unlock its arsenal of weapons. No, there’s no doubt about it. You are, simply, too far gone. You know from experience, a veteran insomniac, that it is better, in such cases, to take to the floors and pace it off.

Change strategies therefore. Go in the opposite direction. Open the floodgates to your intrusive thoughts. Allow them to pull you this way and that, as you pace the floors, as you trace the well-worn steps in the floorboards. Go over everything with a fine-toothed comb. Find a snag and pull on it until it hurts. Recreate conversations in your mind. But give yourself, this time, the chance to get it right. Say all the things you left unsaid. Say them under your breath, right there in the half-light of The Halfway House. Say them once, twice, as many times as necessary. Speed them on their way, the compulsive thoughts. Allow them to run their course. Invent elaborate counterfactual revenge scenarios, ones in which you always come out on top. Get it out of your system. Don’t worry about how much time it takes.

Notice how eventually your blood cools and your hyperventilation subsides. Plop down, pliant, in the chair by the window. Watch the first smudges of light stain the horizon, just above the treeline. Contemplate the snow on the branches of the trees and the roofs of the flats. Envy it. Identify with it. Feel empathetically unsettled by it.

"More Breathing Space," engraving by Janis Goodman, prints available for purchase on artfinder.com

Now you are ready, finally quiet.  Now there is room for what you are about to do.

Grab the little box of matches on the countertop and light the burner of the stove. Fill the kettle with water from the faucet and place it on the burner. Wait until the stainless steel of the kettle starts to creak and crackle. This is the sign. This is how you know that the water is ready.

Fill the mate three quarters of the way to the top with yerba. Tilt the receptacle so that the yerba within it rests at roughly a forty-five-degree angle. Pour a delicate stream of hot water from the spout of the kettle into the part of the mate that has the least yerba in it and place the bombilla there in the deepest depression. Wait for the water at the bottom of the receptacle to lift the yerba at the top ever so slightly, and level the mate as it fills. Suck gently on the bombilla until all the water is gone. Close your eyes and listen for the sound of air passing through the shaft of the bombilla. That sound marks the start of the ritual.

Notice how it is as if there is no more furniture in the room, no more buildings on the block, no more blocks in the city, no more cities along the river that cuts through the valley. There is just forest and the forest creatures. Just the sky and its clouds, unhurried.

Return to your chair in the corner, by the window, by your desk. Grab your mechanical pencil from the desktop and open your notepad. Return, as well, to that one idea that has been rattling around your head all week. Remember that one text that you left unfinished. With steady hands, pick up the line of thought where you last left it. Follow it and see where it goes.

Jot down a few notes. Venture out onto the yellow surface of the paper. Set the words next to each other. See if they stick. See if they take. Attend to their needs. To their inclinations. To their attraction or aversion to the other words. Adhere to their logic. Abide by their rules. Feel their pull. Follow their lead. End up, even. somewhere other than where you expected to go.

Stop now and then along the way to serve yourself another mate. Pull on the bombilla until you hear the air filter through the yerba. Every time you do so, close your eyes momentarily at that precise instant. Appreciate how sharp the sound is.

When the words pile up and a knot forms, stand up and walk over to the stove to place the kettle on the burner until you hear the sound that indicates that the temperature is right. The knot, you will see, will be looser by the time you sit back down.

Lose track of time. Lose yourself in the corridors that lead to doorways that lead to new rooms that lead to still more corridors. Don’t worry about leaving a breadcrumb trail. It won’t be necessary.

Come to your senses abruptly when a thick ray of sunlight, bursting at the seams, barges into the room. Know what this means. The ritual is over. The mate is cold and watered down. The words recede from your approach. They scurry into the cracks in the floorboards.

Realize that it has happened again. It is too late to try to go back to sleep. There are errands to run, bills to pay, clothes to wash, groceries to buy and meals to prepare before your shift at The Community Center. Your mind has already clouded over. Your thoughts are already racing, spinning out of control and crashing into the guardrails. Little explosions, flaring up and fizzling out, flaring up and fizzling out. Here and there, between conflagrations, new ideas will rattle around the rock tumbler. Take note. Save them for later.

You can nap on the train ride to work, slouched against the window. You can sleep in the supply closet on your lunch break, curled up at the foot of the Rubbermaid yellow-and-black cleaning supply pushcart. You can make up eventually for all the lost nights. Perhaps. Or perhaps not.

"The Sunshine Roof," engraving by Sybil Andrews (1898-1992)