I’m not sleeping well lately. My neighbor’s been working on some kind of project. He works late at night, a few nights per week. We’ve never met, but he lives on the other side of a shared wall. The noise from his work cuts through the bricks and finds its way into every corner of my apartment. I’ve tried knocking on the wall, shouting through it. No answer.

The noise is a thin, metallic whirring. The kind that you hear, somehow, in the back of your neck more than in your ears. I’ve spent hours on power-tool Youtube channels, listening to various drills, belt-sanders, and other small machines, trying to find a match for it. Nothing sounds right.

The whirring is neither steady nor rhythmic. It oscillates between high and mid-pitch, between barely audible and a-touch-less-than-loud, seemingly at random.

Just as the whirring itself is arhythmic, so is its occurrence. My neighbor’s work does not correspond to particular days of the week, dates of the month, or phases of the moon. Last week the whirring occurred on Tuesday between 11 and 3:30 and Saturday between 2 and 5:15. The week before that it occurred on Monday (10:30-1), Tuesday (12:15-4), and Friday (1:30-2:30). The week before that it did not occur at all.

The only rule the whirring seems to follow is: “Once it starts, it doesn’t stop until it stops.” There are no breaks between beginning and end, though there are moments in which it is almost sub-audible. I wrote this in a note on my phone the Saturday after Thanksgiving, at 3:38 AM, in a moment of double-relief: relief that it had stopped after a near-record 4-and-a-half continuous hours, and relief that I had identified a single consistency worth recording.

I’ve lived with sleeplessness for long periods of my life. The earliest such period I can remember began with a string of nightmares when I was around three years old. The first is, I think, my earliest memory.

I’m laying in my bed, hugging a stuffed lamb almost the same size as myself, and looking at the window. I look at the window for a long time, convinced that someone or something is going to climb through it. And then, for an instant, I look away, into the black void of my open closet. I turn back to the window and see, standing 6 or 7 feet tall, a man in a filthy, tattered toucan suit. I know it’s a Man in a Toucan Suit because I hear a voice in my head say “It’s a man, a man in a toucan suit.” I throw off the covers, stand up on the side of the bed clutching my lamb by the throat, and the Man in the Toucan Suit disappears. Then I wake up screaming.

Other strange dreams followed—drowning dreams, falling dreams, car crash dreams, chasing dreams, poisoning dreams—almost every night. I never met the Man in the Toucan Suit again, though he was the figure I thought of most often while quivering under the covers. I told nobody about these dreams, and forced myself to stay awake in the dark as long as I could all through that summer. Then, one day, around the time I went to school for the first time, they stopped. I had no nightmares for years, hardly any dreams at all, and no problems sleeping.

There were other periods: the double-whammy of my father’s death and the peak of a late puberty at 14 kept me up at all hours for about 9 months. Sleeping no more than 3 hours a night, I failed two classes and permanently stunted my growth. In my 20s, recurring bouts of hypochondria and paranoia left me wide-eyed and hyperventilating well past midnight, and furiously grinding my teeth when I did manage to fall unconscious. This coupled, predictably, with dreams of teeth falling out, and cancerous pus-filled growths extruding from every inch of my body.

But the whirring comes from somewhere else. It’s neither the repressed returning nor a paranoid fantasy working itself out. It’s a meaningless little chunk of the Real, one that I can neither analyze nor ignore. It demands total attention. The harder I try to tune it out, the more distinctly it impresses itself on my body—my whole body, not just my ears. If I shut my ears with plugs, I can hear it with the soles of my feet, the way that butterflies taste. The feeling is of total exposure.

In his book Time and the Other, a collection of essays drawn from lectures delivered in 1946 and ’47 (coincidentally the same years my house and my neighbor’s house were built), Émmanuel Lévinas invokes insomnia in an attempt to describe the experience of pure, impersonal, anonymous existence, being qua being, what he famously named the “il y a” or “there is.” The paradoxical time of insomnia, he writes, “is constituted by the consciousness that it will never finish—that is, that there is no longer and way of withdrawing form the vigilance to which one is held. Vigilance without end… vigilance without possible recourse to sleep… vigilance without refuge in unconsciousness, without the possibility of withdrawing into sleep as into a private domain.”

Total exposure, absolute vigilance. A vigilance that is not a vigil, not the awaiting for some appointed time, the coming of a holy day or the entrance of a guest. The insomniac is like a Vladimir or an Estragon without a Godot. Or like the narrator of Beckett’s later work The Unnameable—a voice in the tunnel without memory and without hope, without anything to wait for, without even a sense of what it would even mean to wait.

But still, I’ve found it gives some relief to picture the source. Lying awake in bed, I produce an abstract object in my mind, a swirling mathematical vortex of the kind that Schelling may have imagined when he spoke of the formless universe before Creation, the infinite dark expanse of rotary drives in their endless masturbatory circulation. When the pitch or volume changes I picture a corresponding change in the vortex. Each sound has its visual equivalent. I can hold this object in my mind for minutes, sometimes over an hour without interruption.

At first, the internal image is purely reactive to the external noise. The pitch rises, and the vortex spins faster. The volume rises and the vortex ripples more strongly. Vice versa. Slowly, the gap between sound-event and image-event narrows, until the alterations of the image are almost simultaneous with the vicissitudes of the whirring. With practice I feel that I can predict minute sonic alterations in the instants before they occur, though there is still no overarching rhythm or pattern to them.

After a few minutes feeling particularly in sync with my neighbor, I take the absurd step of trying to reverse the causality. I direct every ounce of my will to a single ripple in the imaginary vortex, as if by raising it a single hairs-breadth distance in my mind I might raise the pitch of the whirring just one half-decibel. If I can do that, maybe I can make it stop entirely, bring it to a gentle halt.

Then the synchronicity shatters. The image and the sound separate. The whirring rushes in unexpected directions, and the vortex dissolves, its contours grow hazy and indistinct. Nothing to do from there but wait for it to end. Vigilance. Exposure. Il y a. Il n’y a pas.