The hour when the radio works

At 6:10 this morning I put a dry pot on the butane stove and remembered it four minutes later, when the bottom went pale. The tally on the back of the water card says I have averaged 4 hours 10 minutes a night for twenty-five nights.

The tally on the back of the card

I started the tally on Day 4 out of irritation, in pencil, two columns: hours slept, times woken. It is the only number in this house that moves on its own.

Twenty-five nights. Average 4 hours 10 minutes. The best was 6 hours 5 minutes, the night of Day 21, when we gave up on the watch and slept. The worst were nights 22 and 23, at 2 hours 40 minutes each, after the thing I did on Day 22 that I am not going to explain again.

The wakings are 6 to 9 a night, and they are not mysteries. The stove settling at 2:40. The dog's nails on the hall floor. Ice letting go of the eavestrough at 4:10. The cold, which arrives at 4:00 when the room has lost 4 °C. My own bladder, twice. Her coughing since Day 22. The neighbour's generator starting at 6:00, which is now the alarm.

What it has done to the body is measurable in four places. The thermometer reads 35.9 °C at 6 a.m. three mornings running, and a cold mouth reads low, so I do not trust the number. I trust that my hands were numb in a 12 °C room. My weight is down 4 kg since Day 0, most of it in the last two weeks. The cut on my left hand was still pink along 1 cm of the tape line on Day 24, which the sheet does not call late, and which I looked at every night regardless.

What it has done to the judgement is less tidy. The dry pot this morning. Walking to the corner on Day 25 without gloves and turning around at the gate. And a worse one: on the night of Day 24 I wrote the water figure on the card twice, 26 and then 24 under it, and could not remember which was that week, so I counted the jugs again at 7 a.m. in the dark with a torch in my teeth.

A cut gets a dressing and a date in the margin. Three weeks of this got a tally, and I did nothing with it.

The night watch

The watch started on Day 10, after the jerry can went off the porch. Nobody has come up the lane since. We keep it anyway.

The chair is at the top of the stairs, where both doors are visible. It is 8 °C there at 2 a.m. The radio sits on the arm with 4 AA cells in it and one bar left, and the torch stays under a folded blanket so nothing shows at a window.

The split is 9:20 p.m. to 1:50 a.m. and 1:50 to 6:00. Four and a half hours on the chair, four hours ten on the other side of it, and the sleep is less than the time, because the room is at 8 °C and the blanket is 1.4 kg of wool.

For eleven nights I took both halves. She offered, in ten words, on the first of them. I said I was awake anyway. That was true and it was not the reason. Eleven nights at 4 hours 10 minutes is about 46 hours of sleep where a split would have given 66, and the 20 hours are not the interesting part. The interesting part is that I thought being awake was the only useful thing I was doing.

At 3 a.m. the station out of Toronto comes and goes. A call-in about closed roads, a man reading a market report to nobody, the weather at 3:25 saying −6 °C and nothing coming. I do my thinking in that hour and I do not like the company.

The list is the same every night: the water heater I did not think of for twenty days, the jerry can, the 636 g of briquettes, the batteries that went into a toy in October, the litre in the tank. My inside coat pocket still has the empty bottle and the index card in it. At 3 a.m. none of it is history. It is all still happening at once and I am in the middle of it, awake, with a radio.

The church bell used to mark the hour. Eleven years in this house and I never once heard the 3 a.m. one, because I was asleep. Now I am awake for it and there is no bell, and I have caught myself waiting for it anyway, four or five nights running. That is the whole of what I do about God at 3 a.m. I listen for a bell that is not going to ring. It is not a prayer. I have not decided what it is, and 3 a.m. is a bad hour to decide anything.

The dog sleeps against the stair rail, 30 kg, and barks at nothing. Eleven barks at 3:50 on three nights in a row, which turned out to be the neighbour's gate swinging, and which he fixed on the fourth day with a length of wire and no conversation. The one bark that was a person, at 4:10, was the man from the corner walking to his mother's, and I watched him the length of the street and said nothing.

I sit at the top of those stairs so she can sleep. She sits there so I can. Neither of us has said that out loud and I would rather it stayed that way.

What helped, and what cost me a night

• One room, at 12 °C at 9:20 and 8 °C by 5:00, against 3 °C in the bedroom. The two nights I tried the bedroom gave 2 hours 50 minutes and 3 hours 5 minutes.
• The same order every night: water at 8:40, damper down at 9:00, teeth, out at 9:20. Held on the days when nothing had happened, which is most of them.
• Earplugs. 32 decibels on the packet, foam, out of a box of 200 in a garage two doors down. One pair each, washed in 100 mL and dried on the stove lid. Waking went from 8 a night to 5. Worn on the off shift only; on the watch the dog is the alarm.
• Two shifts instead of one long lie-down. Four hours unbroken is worth more than eight broken, and I did not believe that until I had tried both for a week each.
• Twenty minutes awake means get up. I get up, sit in the chair, and do not read. Reading by torch cost me 40 minutes of sleep on two separate nights before I stopped.
• A 20-minute nap at 1:00 p.m., never after 3:00. The 90-minute nap on Day 24 is why that night gave 3 hours 10 minutes.
• Twenty minutes at the south window at noon with no coat on. It is cold and it works.
• What did not: tea after 4 p.m., twice, both bad nights. And lying still in the dark pretending to sleep, which is the only thing on either list that made it worse.

Water: 24 L this morning, 8.6 L out at the card number unchanged, 32 L of loose snow in for 4.7 L at 75 g of gas. 20 L tonight.

Tomorrow is the twenty-sixth night. The chair is at the top of the stairs, the radio has one bar, and I have not decided whether I am taking the second half again.

What I should have had on day zero

• Ten pairs of 32 dB foam earplugs, about $6, and a small tin.
• Two sleep masks, so the 6 a.m. light is not the thing that decides when the night ends.
• A battery alarm clock, so the night is divided by something other than a phone that died at 9:20 on Day 0.
• Two wool hats for sleeping in, not one. A hat indoors at 8 °C is the difference between four hours and six.
• A watch schedule written on the cupboard door next to the water card, in pencil, with the hours and the names of who takes which half.