I haven't been able to get a good night's sleep so far this week.

At first, I couldn't fall asleep for being rested at the end of vacation. It was cold too, and I had trouble keeping warm. So I'd lie awake tucked into a ball and breathing into the space beneath the covers, never quite getting warm enough to relax. There were the usual cacophonies outside: tires squealing, people yelling, random pops and bangs. Normally these sounds wouldn't wake me, but for some reason, perhaps from the stress of being back on the job, I was easily roused and had trouble settling back into sleep again.

Then there was last night, when I woke at what felt like early morning but was actually about one or two o'clock to the smell of something burning, something with the bitter pungency of the man-made. The experience of that fire in the building a few years ago imprinted deep into the part of my brain that manages survival, so at the second confirmed whiff, I was up and in the kitchen at the stove, panicked that the odor wasn't coming from my place and now faced with the task of convincing myself that the burning could be happening anywhere and for any reason and was not necessarily in my building. It wasn't as dramatic as I now see that sentence sounds, and therefore it wasn't difficult to quell the worry, but it took a little bit of time (tick tock) before I eventually I fell back asleep.

But then, unbelievably, I was awake again at the sounds of my downstairs neighbor coughing and talking. This is the loud, histrionic woman who sometimes assaults the walls and the fixtures in her apartment in shrieks and wails that frighten and cast a diseased pall on this side of the building. She's been coughing for weeks. Deep, low-lung scraping sounds rise through the ceiling whenever she is home, so I always know when she is here and when she isn't. At this mid-night hour, I heard the coughing and murmuring. I heard her boyfriend's too-loud laugh, also a source of regular late-night annoyance. (Loud like loud, I guess.) I dozed off and woke occasionally at sharp upticks in their voices. Then the murmurs changed shape from the improvisational to steady rhythmic grunts until I could hear them clearly growling for climax, which was achieved quickly enough and let go in breathy high-pitched wheezing. I thought it might be the end of it, but a few moments later I heard her reaching for another one, and this one did not come so easily. She howled and strained. The moans crescendoed and faded as she regathered her strength and wore herself out again. Occasionally it sounded as though she had finally convinced herself she had orgasmed, only to have to strive again until finally the whimpers stopped with no confident recording of her having reached her goal. It was miserable—the most despondent, friction-beleaguered sex I'd ever heard.