MargenIn an alley behind the market a shop opened with no window display and a single sign: «We buy sleepless nights. We pay well». I'd gone fourteen without really sleeping. I went in thinking it was a joke. I came out having sold the worst night of my life.
Behind the counter there was an older woman, calm, with the hands of someone who has ironed a great deal of other people's clothes. There were no goods on the shelves: only glass jars, hundreds of them, each with a label and a date.
"What exactly do you sell here?" I asked.
"Nothing. We buy," she said. "Your bad nights. The ones you spend turning over in bed going through everything you did wrong. We keep them, we take them off your hands, and you sleep. Which one have you brought me?"
I thought about naming any of them. But my head went straight, as it always does, to the one night I hadn't been able to let go of in ten years: the night of the accident, of the phone call, of having hung up on my brother telling him I was busy, half an hour before the phone rang again with a different voice on the other end.
I told her without meaning to tell her. The woman nodded slowly, took an empty jar, uncorked it and held it up to my forehead like someone gathering the soul of a candle.
"This one is heavy," she said. "I'll pay you double. Sign here and tonight you'll sleep as you haven't slept in a decade. You'll never remember that night again. The house keeps it."
And then I understood the small print.
"I won't remember it?" I said. "No part of it?"
"None. That's the deal. I take away the pain, but the pain is stuck to the memory. They can't be separated." She looked at me over her glasses. "Nearly everyone signs. They'd rather sleep."
I stood there looking at the jar. Inside, barely visible, something was moving: my brother's tired voice telling me «it's fine, call me tomorrow». His last sentence. Wrapped in the worst night of my life, yes. But his. The last one I had left.
"And if I want to keep it?" I asked.
The woman smiled for the first time, and it was a good smile, the kind you don't expect in a place like that.
"Then go home and carry on not sleeping," she said, corking the empty jar. "Some people come to sell their blackest night. And some people, when they see it inside the jar, realise it's the one thing they wouldn't sell for anything in the world. You're one of the second kind. Congratulations. You're richer than you think."
I walked out into the alley without being paid and without sleeping. That night I turned over in bed again, went through it all again, heard my brother's voice inside me telling me to call him tomorrow. It hurt exactly as much as always.
But for the first time in ten years, while it hurt, I answered him out loud: «Tomorrow, yes. Every tomorrow». And though I didn't sleep, I rested.