Why My Brain Gets Loud at Night (and Quiet in the Morning)
At 4:10 in the morning, I was standing on the back steps of Haddad’s Bakery in pajama pants, my school coat and one mismatched sock, holding a library book as an excuse.
The book was due Thursday. This was not a library emergency. But the bakery light had been on every night that week, and I had been awake to see it every night that week, and at some point around 3:50 my brain had said, very calmly, go ask the person who is awake why he is awake.
I had already tried the usual things. I counted backward from a hundred. I recited the nine slides in my head, and I made it to slide four before the dog showed up. I rearranged my pillow into four separate positions, none of which was a position a human being could sleep in.
Two of me
Okay, so here is my problem. At 11 p.m., my brain turns its volume all the way up. On Friday I had a river-cleanup presentation (four minutes, nine slides, one very large chart), and every night that week my brain had played it like a movie, with new disasters added each time. The projector dies. My voice cracks. A dog walks in.
Then, at 7 a.m., the volume drops to nothing. Morning me eats toast and thinks, What presentation? It’s four minutes. Morning me has never once believed night me. That is the part that makes me furious. We live in the same body, and we don’t even talk.
The back door opened. Mr. Haddad was a large man with flour up to both elbows and a pencil behind his ear, and he looked at me, then at the book, then at the clock over the oven.
“You’re Lina from number nine,” he said. “It’s four o’clock.”
“I know. I brought a book.”
“Why?”
“I honestly don’t know.”
He considered this. Then he said, “Can you shape rolls?”
“I can… learn?”
“Good. Danny didn’t come in, and I have sixty to finish before six.” He held the door wider. “I’m not being kind. I’m behind. I need hands.”
Sixty rolls
The bakery was the warmest place I had ever been at that hour. A radio played something low and crackly, and the whole room smelled like the inside of a loaf. Steel racks lined the walls like bookshelves for bread. Mr. Haddad showed me once: cut, round, tuck. Cut, round, tuck. My first ten rolls looked like small, sad potatoes.
“Again,” said Mr. Haddad, which turned out to be the only feedback he gave. Not “good,” not “bad.” Just “again,” like a very patient metronome.
I had assumed the loudness would stay outside the door. It did not.
“The projector dies,” my brain announced, right over the hum of the mixer. “Your voice cracks. A dog.”
“Your face is doing something,” Mr. Haddad said, not looking up.
“My brain is loud.”
He nodded, like I had told him it was drizzling. “Mine too. Around two. It doesn’t come with an off switch.”
I rounded a roll. “I have a theory,” I said. “I think night me is the real me, and morning me is a liar who just feels better because the sun is out.”
He laughed so hard he had to set down his tray. “Which one told you that?”
“The night one.”
“Then I would say,” said Mr. Haddad, wiping his eyes with a floury wrist, “that the night one is biased.”
I waited for the rest of the answer. There wasn’t one. When I asked him why the nights were louder, he shrugged and said, “Might be the quiet. Might be tired. Might be both. I just know I’d rather be up with something to do with my hands.” He said it like a fact about weather, not like advice, and I decided not to turn it into advice.
I wish I could tell you the volume dropped to zero. It didn’t. It rose and fell like the radio. But somewhere around roll thirty, I noticed something small: I was counting rolls instead of dogs.
That was the entire miracle. One tray, maybe two. It was not a cure or a trick, just a tray of rolls and, for the length of it, a dog who stayed out of the room. At 5:20 the projector came back for a full minute, and I let it, and kept tucking.
At 5:30, the last tray had to rise, and nothing in the world can make dough hurry. Mr. Haddad poured himself a coffee and made me a mug of hot water with honey, because, he said, it was the middle of the night and I was a minor. We sat on two flour sacks and watched the trays do nothing at all. It was the first time all week I had watched something do nothing without feeling responsible for it.
By 5:50, forty-one of the rolls on the rack were mine. Thirteen of them looked like actual rolls. Mr. Haddad slid a paper bag across the counter, still warm enough that I could feel it through my coat.
“Payment,” he said.
“For the presentation?”
“For the labor. The presentation you’re on your own for.”
Outside, the sky had gone the color of dishwater, the good kind. I walked home slowly with the bag against my ribs and watched the streetlights switch off one by one down the block, like someone going through a house, making sure everything was fine.
Friday still had a projector in it. It might still have a dog. I had no answer about my brain and its two schedules, only a bakery, a baker with a loud night of his own, and a bag of bread.
I sat down on the curb in front of number nine and ate the first roll I had ever made. It was lopsided. It was still warm. I would not have believed it at 11 p.m., but it was one of the best things I had ever eaten.
With love,
Lina