Nevertheless he felt his eyelids drooping heavily. To block it out. . .to shut off the day….. Even for a little while. But he could not sleep now, or he would be unable later.
He tried thinking of his mother and brother, grateful that she had escaped from the destruction of Schiller, and that he, still in training, would not see combat for some time. But he was forced to admit that these meant little to him. His brother's life (until very recently, when he had joined the space navy after the fall of Athena), had taken a different path. Tomas was an artist, he a soldier. They were no longer close, as in childhood. And his mother, too, was like a distant figure, his affection for her a dying ember that the fearful walls of her religion kept any living breeze from ever fanning. He cared for nothing and no one, but Ara.
The thought came to him again of his own existence without her. His stomach crawled. He got up and paced back and forth in nervous agitation. This restlessness was maddening! His mind raced, but could seize hold of nothing concrete to calm it. At length, the mock energy expended, he lay down again and covered his eyes, not caring…..
He woke two hours later, feeling stifled in his clothes. And checking the clock he saw that deep night was only just beginning. And knew that he would not be able to sleep for many hours. He sat on the edge of the bed and took off his shirt. His arm started for the light switch, but something drew back the hand. Moved by what he could not say, he reached instead into the drawer of his dressing cabinet and pulled out from it the thick tallow candle, brass capped, that had been given him by his wife. Taking out also the metal igniter, he touched a flame to the wick and set it before him.
For a long time he did not look at his reflected image in the closet mirror, holding his head in his hands, incapable of purity of thought or emotion. He felt little outside his own fatigue, but also a slow strange stirring of the soul.
He looked up, studied his features in the soft, forgiving light of his lover. The face that he had never associated with himself….. His eyes were drawn downward to the wiry muscles that reached from his chest to his arm. Always slender and taut, they now looked almost famished, layered rope wrapped stranding and twine after strand into nothingness. What were they for? And the rage inside him. Could he tear down the walls? Could he dive through the mirror and come to the place where his wife lay needing him, distraught, possibly frightened and in torment?
And suddenly the image changed, becoming sinister and spectral. The remembrance was almost audible.
"And how would you judge me while a Belgian officer was raping your wife?"
Caught in a trap of near despair, simultaneously hit by a rush of dizzy sickness—-a lethal virus had, in fact, attacked his stomach—-his mind and courage reeled in a half physical, half emotional torment. Snatches of conversations with Dubcek came back to him, echoed and enforced, made indisputable by the darkness that hung thick and menacing around him. They dove and swirled like insane, angry birds. His spirit palled before them.
"You must learn to be cynical"