A Story

As though unseen fingertips had touched her eyes, they opened upon a pitch darkness into which she stared a long while until she regained her senses; and with a mechanical movement her hand reached out to the button hanging from the bed and pressed it, and her eyelids narrowed in a strained glance at the clock... She knew beforehand that it was two!... Strange, this tyrannical insomnia — with what precision it keeps its appointments... This is the tenth day she has waked fully at just this hour, and nothing brings sleep back to her but a red pill she has grown used to... And yesterday her doctor warned her of the consequences of what she was doing... addressing her in the tone of a counseling father:

'Listen, Lamia. This drug numbs the ailment; it

does not remove it. The cause of the insomnia must be sought out and treated. I am certain you know it better than anyone. Here is your own self — take counsel with it in the matter. You are intelligent, you have reached the university stage, and I have no need to remind you that a ship adrift without a captain never finds its way to the safe shore.'

The doctor was right! Right in every word. She knows the cause of her sleeplessness better than any human being. For two weeks she has been prey to obsessions from which she can find no way out, and she knows that in her nightly resort to the red pill she is only fleeing her own reality out of weakness and cowardice... And she knows too that her drifting ship, alone and without a captain, will never one day bring her to the shore. The night, no doubt, is suited to the