Dan Chaon, Sleepwalk

narrative dilations & spinning microscope knobs

“The bark of the mesquite trees crackled as they grew, and the wind blew the sand into elaborate Sanskrit messages, and within me I could sense the vast microbiome full of creatures — bacterial, archaeal, viral, fungal — two percent of our body mass, they say, equivalent in size to the brain or the liver — all these living beings going about their business in the great primeval forest of my innards, eating and swimming and hunting and having their own adventures and experiences, and the time between one of my heartbeats and the next was like centuries to them; and simultaneously I was aware of myself as a mitochondrion in the body of the galaxy, and the galaxy as a speck in the body of the universe, and a nurse’s aide fed me pureed carrots and I was given another injection and I felt lukewarm water being sprayed upon my lower quarters as my diaper was changed.”

Occasionally when I’m putting away leftovers after dinner, my eyes darting between the Tupperware drawer and the pan on the stove, I’ll find myself gripped by a wild surmise: what if all of this could fit in that?

As often as not this turns out to be a shocking miscalculation. The leftover pasta could fill two of the containers I was considering. The lentil soup could have fit in a container a third the size. But once in a rare while the planets governing spatial relations will align and, with the silent assurance of Cinderella trying on the glass slipper, the cooling heap of dinner will fill its chosen container exactly.

Dan Chaon, halfway through his bizarre and wonderful novel Sleepwalk, experiences just such a charmed moment. The book’s hero and narrator, a fifty-year-old bounty hunter/miscreant-of-all-trades named Will Bear, is recalling his stay at age eighteen in an Arizona mental hospital.

I had achieved a state of consciousness akin to that of a fetus in a womb. Over the two years of my incarceration, I had gained about a hundred pounds and generally I was content to sit in an extra-wide wheelchair and quietly expand.

Unpromising circumstances, physically, literarily, and otherwise. But Chaon manages, in the course of describing Bear vegetating in his wheelchair, to give us a sentence more loaded up with nutrients and stray flavorful bits than any sentence I’ve encountered in years.

But before I get to the sentence: Sleepwalk is written in a prickly, funny, profundities-with-a-hangover voice that resembles Denis Johnson and George Saunders at their slangy best. Most of the novel hovers just over Bear’s shoulder as he carries out a particularly sinister sequence of errands. Reading it feels like riding along in the passenger seat of his tricked-out motor home, surrounded by buzzing burner phones and watching as nightmarish assemblages of near-future stuff (jaunty surveillance drones; filthy flakes of volcano ash) stream past.

So the mental hospital interlude functions as a kind of road shoulder on which the reader, briefly outside the vehicle and its chaotic hurtle, can stand and catch her breath. In the hospital there was nothing to do but smoke in front of the TV and stare at the desert on the other side of the reinforced glass. Which means that the narrative voice, like the narrator, has the opportunity to quietly expand.

And so, with Bear stuck in his window seat (“I beheld the flower heads of the globe chamomile turning on their stalks…”), Chaon’s prose begins to dilate. And that dilation needs, for reasons that will become apparent, to fit into a single sentence.

Deep breath.

The bark of the mesquite trees crackled as they grew, and the wind blew the sand into elaborate Sanskrit messages, and within me I could sense the vast microbiome full of creatures — bacterial, archaeal, viral, fungal — two percent of our body mass, they say, equivalent in size to the brain or the liver — all these living beings going about their business in the great primeval forest of my innards, eating and swimming and hunting and having their own adventures and experiences, and the time between one of my heartbeats and the next was like centuries to them; and simultaneously I was aware of myself as a mitochondrion in the body of the galaxy, and the galaxy as a speck in the body of the universe, and a nurse’s aide fed me pureed carrots and I was given another injection and I felt lukewarm water being sprayed upon my lower quarters as my diaper was changed.

Some sentences need a bit of table-setting to make their greatness apparent; some don’t. I have handed Sleepwalk to multiple people, turned to the page on which this sentence appears, and each time it has elicited an audible sound, as if I’d accompanied the passage with an elbow to the solar plexus.

To verbalize the content of that oof: part of what’s astonishing about the sentence is that it is a sentence. The sentence is all about the all-but-unfathomable cosmos that each of us both contains and, however minutely, contributes to. And so it must itself be a freakishly overfilled stuff sack — it embodies the phenomenon that it describes.

But my love for the sentence is not merely technical. There’s something about the rapid spinning of a microscope’s focus knob — the realization that a river delta, viewed from a sufficient distance, is indistinguishable from a bolt of lightning which is indistinguishable from a nerve cell — that reliably sets my own nerve cells quivering. But Chaon, breaking new ground in distortions of scale, doesn’t settle for the merely visual; he delves into the temporal (the time between one of my heartbeats and the next was like centuries to them).

And all this — had the sentence ended at its semicolon — would have been plenty; it would have gone directly into my file of favorite passages. But Chaon is, with the teeming innards business, merely warming up. Without even a pause he swaps the microscope for a telescope and begins spinning that knob, to similarly dazzling effect: …a mitochondrion in the body of the galaxy, and the galaxy as a speck in the body of the universe…

That he can manage all this without bursting the seams of our attentional abilities — that he can nod toward elaborate Sanskrit messages and then in the same sentence transcribe them — that he can achieve such heights while still landing the sentence amidst the humbling, narratively-true business of diaper changes and hind-quarter washings — all of this makes the passage not merely good but a kind of miracle. Chaon had one of those thoughts so intricate and expansive that it is perhaps better described as a vision, and he managed not only to articulate it but to do so within the confines of the humble English sentence. The lid clicks shut and we store it away in our brimming fridge of artistic delights. It fits.