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It’s the morning after Meyer returned from Atlantic City and he hasn’t slept.
He could have. He’s been practically sleep-walking since he sat down at that table, in that too-well-lit club, with Nucky (Mr Thompson ), Masseria, and that soft-spoken Harlemite whose name was either Nerisse or Narcisse (why can’t he remember?). Exhaustion has seeped into his limbs, the kind that gives meaning to the phrase ‘bone tired’.
He could have slept. But he won’t let himself.
He sits at his desk and makes notes, his handwriting so messy it no longer looks like his. He tells himself he needs to get everything straight before he forgets anything. That he needs to have a record of everything that was said (and not said). That he needs to understand what this all means. That he’s witnessed a shift in power (as much as ‘he’ witnessed anything, as much as ‘he’ even existed between the moment the gun was removed from his head and the moment he stepped through the door of his hotel room).
He’s done this before, many times. He can always find a reason not to sleep.
The first time was the night he lost the money his mother had given him in that craps game. He slipped out of the bed he shared with his brother and climbed through the window onto the fire escape. He didn’t have his own set of dice, so he ran the probabilities over in his head, trying to figure out what he’d done wrong, what he’d do next time. Yetta found him curled up on the cold metal the following morning.
The next time he can remember was the night Charlie was sent to Hampton Farms. He sat out on the fire escape that night too, legs dangling off the edge, forehead pressed against the metal, thinking, thinking. ‘What comes next, what comes next, what comes next…?’
He knew he had a choice to make. This was a point where he could step away. It had been a good arrangement, profitable (terrifying, exhilarating, wonderful). But now the glue who held him to the gang wasn’t around and no one would blame him for unsticking himself the rest of the way (they’d probably welcome it, good to have that half-pint, know-it-all Yid out the way, they always cause trouble in the end... )
He told himself he shouldn’t sleep until he’d made a decision. But the truth was, he’d already made it the second he saw Charlie carted away.
He can always find a reason not to sleep. But it’s never the actual reason. That reason, absurd to the point of requiring these flimsy alibis, is that sometimes the thought of sleep scares him senseless.
He’s not afraid he won’t be able to sleep, that he’ll lie awake in suffocating silence and darkness longing for it. He fears sleep itself. The way it swallows him up, sucks him down, steals his thoughts (his mind, his self ). How he’ll sometimes wake with a start, only a Yiddish word on his tongue, a fading smell of smoke, and an unnameable dread as clues to what he was dreaming about. The sense that he’ll somehow be a different person when he wakes. Someone almost like him, but not quite. Someone he doesn’t know if he can trust.
It’s that loss of continuity, that feeling of being obliterated and put back together again, that drives him to these stubborn, nonsensical all-nighters. At 2am he fools himself, truly believing he can exist on nothing but cigarette smoke and coffee. He always ends up cursing himself by 6am, when the ashtray is overflowing, weariness is gnawing at his insides, and the world is gray and distant. He knows then, when sleep inevitably does take him, it will drag him down deeper and darker than it ever would if he’d just given in earlier.
This is the stage he’s at now, as the light of dawn spills over the windowsill of his hotel room. He sits with his elbows on the desk, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands as if to massage wakefulness into them. There’s a mug with coffee still in it, but his stomach twists at the thought of forcing any more down.
He stands, wincing and rubbing his neck as a twinge runs through it (the gun barrel pressed to the back of his head, forcing it forward further than it wants to go ). He walks over to the window (the carpet beneath his feet doesn’t quite feel solid) and looks out. The rising sun is squatting above the city skyline, red, bright, taunting. He closes his eyes and rests his forehead on the cool glass.
“Idiot.”
He’s been doing this a lot lately. It was easy to find a reason down in Tampa. There were land purchase documents to go over, shipments to keep track of, and who could sleep in that damn heat anyway?
(Charlie. That’s who. And he’d have made sure Meyer slept too.)
He pushes away from the window and paces back to the desk. He turns to a fresh page in his notebook and stares at it for a minute or so.
It was four years ago when he started writing notes to himself before sleeping. Simple things, usually. Call Frank. Go over the books. Check on Benny. It’s not that he expects to forget them. They act less as reminders and more as threads strung up between now and later . A way to instill some trust in the person he’ll be when he wakes up.
It was Charlie who first suggested it, back in 1920, when the deal with Nucky Thompson had fallen through the first time. (The first time. How had that man had him on his knees with his life in his hands twice now, how had he let it happen twice?)
“Go to bed, Meyer.”
“I need to figure out what we’re going to tell AR. We can pin most of the blame on the D’Alessios but he’s still going to want to know how we’ll make it right. If we can find a way to give him a solution to—”
“Meyer. This can wait.”
“I’m in the middle of a thought.”
“So write it down. Pick it up again tomorrow. Now for fuck’s sake, get some sleep.”
It was a simple solution. Almost laughably so. Charlie likely didn’t know how useful the advice would be. He’d just been fishing for a way to get his bullheaded partner to go to bed. He hadn’t realised he was throwing Meyer a life raft.
He blinks, vision slightly blurred. Then he jots down a few lines:
‘Nerisse or Narcisse? Find out which.’
‘Who tipped Nucky off? Make list.’
He taps the page with his pen nib, leaving a small dot of ink. Then he scrawls down one last sentence:
‘See Nucky Thompson on his knees, someday.’