There’s gonna be a couple ground rules. Rule number one: always keep the curtains drawn. Rule number two: only open the door if you hear my secret knock. And rule number three: don’t ever go out alone, especially during daylight. That’s it. Three rules. I call em the, uh, Don’t Be Stupid Rules.

—Sheriff Jim Hopper, Stranger Things

The First Rule of Project Mayhem is you do not ask questions. The Second Rule of Project Mayhem is you do not ask questions. The Third Rule of Project Mayhem is that in Project Mayhem there are no excuses. The Fourth Rule of Project Mayhem is that you cannot lie. The Fifth Rule of Project Mayhem is you have to trust Tyler.

—Narrator, Fight Club

Dear Mikey,

It’s late. Again. I’m not talking about tardy. It isn’t that we slept through our alarm and showed up two hours after our shift began. It isn’t that Wendy’s period hasn’t arrived when it should have. It’s late in the day, late in the evening, late in our lifetimes, not late the way things usually are. Time is almost up, huh?

The clock reads eleven forty-eight PM. The coffee pot is cold, still, heavy dregs all that remain at the bottom. There’s another cup and half left, and it’s strong enough to chew. The bowl is loaded, the bong resting on its designated corner of our desk, skunk weed daring us to stay sober for a few more seconds. The water is milky, nuggets of ash and flower swimming in its muck. Coagulated residue rings the bottom of the chamber; we could smoke the greenish-brown remnants if there was a way to get them out. We really need to clean the bong. The stale taste of smoke occupies our gums, keeps our tongue busy. Was it you or me who smoked that menthol three hours ago? Was it you or me who woke up yesterday around eleven and hasn’t been able to sleep since? It honestly doesn’t matter, does it? If you smoked or I woke up? If you read this while I write or after? If we ever really communicate?

It’s late. Again. The kind of late that only accompanies sleep deprivation, that only journeys with insomnia. Our body needs rest, and it’s been over thirty-six hours since the last time our brain shut down long enough for our respiratory system to snore. In all that time, we’ve managed to get fuck-all on the page. If we’re going to ignore biological necessities for whatever reasons—good ones, I’m sure—could we at least get done the things we need to do? If we’re going to break our genetic code’s rules, could we at least do so with purpose?

I know, I know, we technically don’t have much say in our sleep patterns, in whether Morpheus deems it important enough to visit us on a given evening, but I can’t shake this feeling we’re fucking up by not being able to sleep. Somehow, this is our fault. We are breaking the rules after all. The fundamental question plaguing humanity has very little to do with essence or existence, but of what rules govern reality. Based on our limited understanding of the human body, we know that between seven and nine hours of sleep are required for it to properly function. We know that we’ll shut down after seventy-two consecutive hours awake. We know that we’ll likely die if we don’t sleep for three hundred sixty hours. These are the parameters that govern humanity’s relationship with sleep, at least the ones we’re currently aware of.

We don’t have a complete list of the rules we’re forced to operate under simply because we’re alive. I’m starting to wonder if we ever will, if there will ever be enough history for us to understand how everything best works, or if we will forever be classified as ignorant. Is ignorance really a problem if we’re aiming to solve it? Is it a sin if our ignorance isn’t willing?

It’s late. Again. I no longer know that means.

Thank you for your time,

– Michael

Hey Michael,

Insomnia’s a bitch, huh? It’s no fun needing to sleep, knowing you need to sleep, and still being unable to sleep. That isn’t what’s really bothering you, though, is it? Buried underneath your existential ramblings is the accusation you’re too polite to make in plain language. You dance around what you want to say, hiding what’s eating behind jargon and multisyllabic phrases that ultimately contain no meaning. Don’t worry. I don’t suffer from your passive aggression.

Aggressive aggression is much more my style.

You think it’s my fault we haven’t written anything in weeks and now can’t sleep. You want to bridge the metaphorical gap between us, write some bullshit epistle as an olive branch when its real purpose is to absolve you from responsibility. All that money thrown at therapy hard at work. Out of the two of us, I’m the writer, so writer’s block must be my problem to solve, right? That’s the logic on which you’re relying?

I’m not to blame for whatever is keeping us from getting words on the page, but I am what’s keeping you awake. It’s been forty-two hours now, forty-two hours since we last woke up, forty-two hours since either of us last tasted sleep. You think you can spend your days smoking too much pot, lounging about your shitty apartment, worrying too much about the state of world outside, without putting forth any amount of real effort toward our goals. You want me to take care of the writing, of the exercising, of all the badass shit you fancy yourself guilty of, while you just to sit there, a tangled mess of depression and anxiety with which I’m forced to coexist. You want to talk about the rules? How about the one that dictates you and I have to share a body, share a mind?

What we need right now is a solution to writer’s block, a solution to your apathy. We solve that, you get to sleep. That’s the new deal. You broke the terms of out old one by staring at the ceiling for the last month. Now we do things my way. You dig?

Solution #1

I get up from this old seat, the one we stole from Yvette before she moved out, when I’m done with this letter. I take what marijuana you have left and torch it in the oven. Several hours at five hundred degrees ought to render that shit inert. When what’s left of your flower is nothing but a smoldering pile of ash, I smash your bong into several pieces. I was thinking of walking out the back door, holding it over the wooden railing, the one painted a baby blue, and letting it break against the concrete two floors down. After the bong is just too many shards of sludge-caked glass, I unsubscribe you from your streaming services. Won’t Wendy love that? Then I break your phone. When you have no more distractions, the only thing we’ll be able to do is write.

Solution #2

I stay here, plant our shared ass in this faded wood, and refuse to budge. We both know I’ll ignore any biological urge that threatens the process. We’ll sit right here for the next thirty hours in our own shit and piss, staring at that blinking cursor of a blank document until either our fingers are cable of crafting fiction or the micro-naps start. How long do you think you’ll last?

Solution #3

I remove the pistol you have stashed away in the filing cabinet, that little snub-nosed thirty-eight you got after college, and I fill your wife with holes. With her dead, you’ll be heading to prison. With you in prison, we’ll have three square meals a day, a place to rest our head, access to both a gym and a library. And all the time in the rest of our lives to accomplish what we said we would.

If you would like to take the act of writing seriously, if you would make it your highest priority, instead of wasting precious moments on philosophical musings regarding the rules governing reality or on getting too high to function, you’d be able to sleep. And you know it.

All the best,

– Mikey

Dear Mikey,

Solution #4

I take that same Saturday Night Special, the one you mistakenly think is in the filing cabinet, the one that actually doesn’t exist out here in the real world at all, but flutters about in the spaces between my synapses until you find a story that just needs another gun, one less conspicuous than a nine millimeter automatic Browning, and place the barrel under my chin. I’ll pull the trigger. It’ll take less than a second for the bullet to carve my life from my death. How much time will it take for that same bullet to cleave you from the wreckage of my grey matter?

For someone who complains about me getting high all the time, you sure do like smoke all my pot. That bowl I loaded too many hours ago is mysteriously nothing but ash.

Solution #5

I take the yellow-gripped hammer out of the drawer. With my left hand, I take the hammer and break every bone in my right hand. I let the pain carry me to sleep.

You, as you always do, relish in violence, in stark depictions of human misery. My passive aggression is born out of the simple idea that people deserve to be treated as people, even when they’re in the wrong. Your lack of empathy probably is more of a problem than writer’s block or the pot or the depression. For fuck’s sake man, the world is at a standstill due to a viral pandemic, society seems to be buckling under the weight of its own racist history, and liberal democracy is going the way of the dodo, yet you have to audacity to threaten the woman I want to spend the rest of our lives with all because you think a prison sentence would do well for our writing. If quarantine and the global rise of fascism has me so on edge that I’d rather spend a few days on the couch with the munchies, what do you think being trapped behind bars is going to do?

At least your solutions are somewhat amusing. There’s nothing original in what you’re doing, throwing a tantrum like some sullen toddler. They show me what you really are. You aren’t the writer here, anymore than you’re the athlete or the fighter. No, you’re just a coping mechanism that I’ve outgrown. How’s that for therapy?

As I’m reaching forty-eight hours without sleep, I can’t really remember what I invented you to cope with in the first place. Must have not been all that important, huh?

Solution #6

You go away. And you never come back.

Thanks for nothing,

– Michael

Listen here asshole,

Solution #7

Fuck off.

Sincerely,

– Mikey

From                The Gang: voices@headspace.mjt

To                    Michael: pilot@headspace.mjt

Mikey: co-pilot@headspace.mjt

Subject            For Fuck’s Sake

Seriously you two?

It’s now been fifty-four hours since any of us have slept. Fifty. Four. Hours. Can you count, suckers?

Look, we took a vote. All of us agreed, we can’t just sit here and let the two of you but heads like this while we slowly lose any grasp we had on sanity. It was unanimous. Pretension and Pragmatism even shook hands. Have they ever found common ground on a single issue in all the time we’ve existed?

And, c’mon, we get it. We fucking do. How often does one of you have to take a trip inside and adjudicate some petty squabble or heated dispute between us? It’s usually once or twice a week. We aren’t exactly the most agreeable bunch. We know that.

But when we fuck about, when we cause trouble, when we fight with each other, we don’t bring the whole boat down. One—or both—of you steps, straightens us out, keeps in some semblance of line. Sure, we push against the boundaries you set—we are you after all—but even on our worst days, we ain’t blowing holes in the hull.

Michael, we understand where you’re coming from. You gave Mikey the keys to the kingdom, told him to take whatever he wanted from wherever he wanted to craft thought-provoking, heat-pounding, bodily-devastating fiction. You gave him a mission, and he doesn’t always follow through. But, man, you can’t just expect him to create at all hours of every day if you don’t provide him with what he needs. Sitting on the couch, bong in one hand, cock in the other, some boring ass porno playing in the background is not going to feed your imagination.

We really need sleep. Desperately need sleep. Can you two work something out before we hit the hallucinatory stage?

– The Voices in Your Head

From                Mikey: co-pilot@headspace.mtj

To                    Michael: pilot@headspace.mtj

The Gang: voices@headspace.mtj

Subject            RE: For Fuck’s Sake

Ha!

They torched your pompous ass. Serves you right.

And I’ll agree to getting us to sleep if this asshole admits it’s his fault.

– Mikey

From                The Gang: voices@headspace.mtj

To                    Mikey: co-pilot@headspace.mtj

Michael: pilot@headspace.mtj

Subject            RE: For Fuck’s Sake

Real mature, Mikey. It’s not like your entirely blameless here, is it?

When was the last time you did your job? You know, telling stories. When was the last time you sat down in front of the screen and typed away until your fingers bled, until a narrative started to take shape on the page? Because he’s right: it’s been a while.

You can try to blame good ol’ fashioned writer’s block for as long as it makes you feel better. The ugly truth, though, is that you’re as scared as he is right now. That fear is what’s keeping you from doing what was asked of you, what is demanded of you, and you know that. The world is falling apart around you, and you don’t know if you’re the right one to try and hold it together. Fear is healthy, Mikey, but not when it becomes debilitating. Michael rightly called you out for not writing, and he rightly pointed out that you do smoke a lot of his weed, that this addiction—and yes, marijuana can be mentally addicting, even if it isn’t physically so; Addiction checked into this—is shared by both of you.

How did you respond to his admittedly passive aggressive first correspondence? You swung for the goddamned fences, man. You went for the throat with teeth bared and claws out, attacking an honest request for help of some kind instead of dealing with the honest criticism in a mature way.

Boys, we’re pushing sixty hours awake. Can you please stop the dick measuring contest long enough for us to recharge? Or should we just prepare for death?

– The Voices in Your Head

From                Michael: pilot@headspace.mtj

To                    Mikey: co-pilot@headspace.mtj

The Gang: voices@headspace.mtj

Subject            RE: For Fuck’s Sake

Okay, I’ll admit I’ve been in the wrong. This pandemic, the economic fallout just around the corner, our suddenly very uncertain future has me scared shitless. We just graduated with an advanced degree we’ve been after for the last decade, and we didn’t expect to run out of solid ground so soon after completing this journey. The sidewalk ends. The abyss looms.

That fear isn’t a good reason for lying around doing nothing. This is the time to immerse ourselves in good fiction, to lose ourselves in the best creations humanity has to offer. This is the time to sharpen our claws, file our teeth down to points, to go hunting for that elusive prey called an audience.

Turning on each other like this should be against the rules.

Mikey, I’m sorry. Boys, I’m sorry. I’ll try to be better when we wake up.

– Michael.