Second-Hand Mattress Theory

I met Mike on Facebook Marketplace. I wanted to buy a second-hand mattress and he was selling one. “Double matress 4 sale”, his advert read. “Memory foam. no sprigs at all. V good condition. Reason for selling is need space!! Inbox me for more :)”. The mattress had been photographed on a garage floor under fluorescent lighting. I clicked through the six pictures he had uploaded, which were virtually all the same. In the background were a few items of crap: a box of DVDs, some kettlebells, an empty fish tank, a bong. I’d seen worse. The mattress was sea-green in colour with floral patterning. It had a few grey splotches, but he was selling for a good price. A shiny scatter cushion had been strewn across it, presumably for the pictures. For some reason, I was touched by this small effort.

I clicked on Mike’s profile. He’d joined Facebook in 2018, had 157 friends, and lived fourteen kilometres away from me – in Port Elizabeth’s industrial area, close to the newly-built data centre. I suspected Mikey Mike wasn’t his real name, but he looked like a decent enough guy, like he’d treat a woman right if he had the money. He could have been 28 or 48, he had one of those androgynous faces, you know? Miraculously unweathered by time, gender, hardship, or pollution. In addition to the mattress, Mike had three other active listings: an old iPhone, a pair of MaXed running shoes, and a 1kg tub of protein powder. I got a good vibe from him.

I sent Mike a message.

[9.12pm] Me: Hey is this mattress still for sale?

[9.42pm] Mikey Mike: yea

[9.50pm] Me: Weird question but how many people +- have slept on it? lol

[9.58pm] Mikey Mike: aish not sure maybe like 10 people max .. why tho? LOL 🙂

It was too soon to be telling strangers on the internet about my latest theory on sleep, so I didn’t answer his question then and there. If my theory was to be proven correct, however, I needed a mattress with just the right amount of history. ‘10 people max’ seemed like an ideal number for the first phase of my experiments. When I offered to pay cash on delivery, Mike sent a black thumbs-up. Since he wasn’t a black guy himself, I wasn’t sure whether to read this as racist, inclusive, or inconsequential. In the end, I put it down to a typo. He’d deliver the mattress the following afternoon. “No probs”, he said.

#

Three months before this transaction with Mike, I had barely slept. I had just deregistered from my Pharmacy degree at Nelson Mandela University and this sudden freeing-up of my schedule had something to do with it – but not entirely. On the form, under ‘Reason for deregistration’, I wrote ‘mental health break’. Both vague and specific enough not to warrant too many questions from the Dean. I figured I’d stay in Port Elizabeth for the rest of the semester, do an online TEFL course from my apartment in Summerstrand, journal, workout, get a boyfriend maybe. Just until I figured out my next move. Weirdly, my parents didn’t put up much of a fight when I told them I just “wasn’t feeling the vibe anymore“. Nor did they stop fronting my rent and pocket-money. It surprised me sometimes, how naive they were, and how spoiled I was. I figured that me being out of the nest must’ve been beneficial for my parents, too. They’d since subdivided our house near the Camdeboo Nature Reserve, turned it into an Airbnb. My mom sent me millions of pics of my old bedroom that now looked like a Mr Price Home advert. All my drawings of plants, Harry Potter books, polaroid pictures, and amateur bug collection now replaced by fake ferns, pastel throws, and Live Laugh Love motifs.

While my father led hikes through the Valley of Desolation, my mother fussed around the mostly white American tourists who passed through the town of Graaf-Reinet. In her new Superhost persona, I could tell my mother felt creative, exotic, empowered – like her generic opinions about South African politics and craft beer were now services she could provide, stars she could amass. Who was I to go home, mope around in my existential crisis, and steal her shine? These, however, were not the sort of thoughts that kept me up at night.

I’d tried everything to appease my insomnia. Concoctions of valerian, melatonin, magnesium, and antihistamines decorated my bedside table, like a shrine to the sleep gods. I practiced less screen time and more cardio. I strung up blackout curtains and waltzed around burning impepho. I took cold showers, did breathing exercises, tried masturbating, played sleep hypnosis playlists, and switched off the wifi router – at least until I needed to Google something. If two years of studying Pharmacy had taught me anything, it was that sleep is regulated by complex neurochemical systems and insomnia results from disruptions in these systems. Despite this knowledge, it took me a long time to see my sleep issues as systemic, in the Humanities’ sense of the word.

I could have reached out to my parents, sure, but any inkling of me not doing well would have had them insisting I come home. Besides, what could my small-town parents possibly tell me about sleep that ChatGPT could not? I placed faith – too much, perhaps – in strangers on the internet instead. Like Chantelle, for instance, the medium I booked an online consultation with via PsychicsOfAfrica.com. I’d experienced it before, when the minute I reached out for help – or perhaps it was the minute I paid for something – my problem magically resolved itself. I believed that Chantelle was it – my white saviour in tattooed eyeliner. But my twenty-minutes with Chantelle went by in a pixelated blur. She told me that pharmaceuticals were blocking my third eye; that my ancestral trauma was wrecking my gut biome; that I must bathe in basil oil; and try her tincture made by “real sangomas in the Amatole forest“. This was all before her face froze on my screen – her features warbled into something that resembled a tree fungus I’d seen in the Camdeboo Nature Reserve once with my dad. He’d smacked my hand that time, my dad, and told me not to touch it. As compensation for the glitch, Chantelle would courier the tincture to me at no extra cost. No probs, she had typed. Just like Mike.

But no matter what natural or supernatural remedies I tried, I couldn’t seem to manifest sleep. For no good reason, it just began to drift further away from my body. The way youth and sanity did these days, slowly and cruelly.

#

Things began to take a turn one night when an epiphany entered my mind. The thought was so crisp, it startled me. As if it were a naked guest and I had walked in on it by mistake. The epiphany was quite simple: my mattress had not learned how to sleep. How could I not have realised this before? I thought, massaging the skin between my brows. My theory continued to flow that night, like a waterfall pouring from Camdeboo through my head, down my limbs, out into Nelson Mandela Bay, and into the universe. My logic went something like this:

The mattress I had been sleeping on was bought brand new. And, this was why it had not acquired any memory of human sleep. If one-third of human life was spent sleeping, surely all those hours spent together alone in the dark meant a human consciousness had to merge with the consciousness of a mattress? Just like a potter and their clay or a bus driver and their seat. My new mattress – and perhaps all new mattresses by extension – needed a sound sleeper from the start to build a healthy sleep memory. Foam memory people always speak about was not just a physical quality of mattresses – but a metaphysical, psychosocial, biotechnological one too. Now – stay with me here – a second-hand mattress, in contrast to a new mattress, was far more likely to know the weight of a restless body and adjust accordingly. Therefore, as a poor sleeper, I needed a second-hand mattress with a sound sleep memory if I had any hopes of achieving sound sleep myself. It’s like lineage – sleep lineage.

It was, however, only at this part of the epiphany that I began to cry: I was not the problem; the problem was the mattress.

#

The following day, post-epiphany, I lugged my mattress out of my apartment and down the three flights of stairs. Two of my neighbours passed me in the hall. The middle-aged brown guy who was always freshly showered and sucking on a mint. And the black girl with the nose ring and the Indian boyfriend, who I’d seen at the uni gym, with the big Instagram following, apparently. Anyways, they both took their EarPods out and offered to help me. Without making eye-contact, I mumbled“Nothanks“, and quickened my pace. I wanted to be alone with my epiphany. I felt protective over it. Like if anyone got too close to me, they would see it swimming in my mind; reach in and catch it like a fish. I had just found the solution to all my problems and had come up with an entirely novel theory that had the potential to save the world from insomnia. I was going to be famous, like those people who cured AIDS or Autism.

The parking lot was empty as usual. Just a few smashed bottles, piles of Takealot boxes, a broken mop, and some KFC bones being pecked by pigeons. A familiar tableau of depression. I sat down in the winter sun and stared at my mattress, which had now added personal meaning to the scene. I thought about pouring petrol and setting it alight, like people did in movies. It shamed me, sometimes, just how clichéd my imagination was. Either way, the burning would be a dramatic anecdote to tell, when my theory was eventually backed by science and people started interviewing me on podcasts and TV. I’d describe it all poetically, you know? The flames and the smoke rising from the mattress, stretching over the Eastern Cape, South Africa, the continent, the world – like a giant healing blanket. It would be symbolic and deep, like how astronauts describe outer space. Of course, I imagined Oprah’s face, too. “I got goose flesh,” she’d say as she listened, and the housewives in the crowd would nod and clap, affirming my contribution to the human race.

My search for a second-hand mattress began soon after that.

#

I studied Mike from the slats in my blind before buzzing the gate open. He drove a rusted Toyota Corolla with the mattress tied on top. It was difficult to tell whether he was a trustworthy guy from the window, but if anything happened, I’d just scream really loud, I told myself. I cleared my throat, checked my nostrils in the mirror, and went downstairs to meet him. Mike’s figure was strange for a man. His clothes moulded to his body like a gift that was difficult to wrap; like a spade, or a wind chime. He rearranged two cellphones between his front and back pockets, then put out his hand to shake mine. This felt too formal for a Facebook Marketplace deal, but I enjoyed the novelty of the gesture. I made a point of shaking firmly.

On the count of three, Mike and I picked up the mattress. He puffed his cheeks out like a cartoon as he squatted. I laughed before knowing if it was supposed to be funny. Together, we dragged the mattress up three flights of stairs, stopping to rest every few minutes. I was impressed that we didn’t need to communicate these stops and starts. It all seemed so organic, like we were reading each other’s minds, even though I knew that was stupid. At every break, between our panting, Mike asked me a question about something or other: “You seen what Trump’s doing?” “You seen those kids starving on the internet?” You seen that meme?” Every time, I responded with, “Yeah hectic”, my thighs shaking.

Once inside my apartment, we propped the mattress against the wall. I punched it with my fist in a way that was unnecessarily macho. “Feels solid”, I said. Mike scratched his armpit and smiled. “Could I trouble you for some water?”, he asked. “Sure”, I said, somewhat relieved to be having a conversation I could follow. He tailgated me to the kitchenette. On the counter was a knife and some pieces of pineapple I’d left out on the chopping board. There were two flies copulating on top. I swatted them away, blushing. Mike downed the water, then wiped his mouth on my dishcloth. “You ever eaten a fly?” he asked, swatting the air around the chopping board too. Before I could answer, he told me that two percent of the world’s flies had been proven safe for human consumption and that eating flies reduced the risk of heart disease and that he wasn’t an insect scientist but was applying for a job laying internet cables in Europe and he liked my hoodie because it looked expensive and he was saving up to study electrical engineering and that he must go now but believed insects were the future of protein. “Nice”, I said, picking up a slice of pineapple, the juice racing toward my elbow in a bead of sweat.

#

As soon as Mike left, I took my bra off and got my vacuum cleaner out. As I ran the wand up and down the surface of the mattress, I thought about this article I’d read the other night that said there are up to twenty types of fungi living in the average bed mattress. I imagined what the vacuum might’ve been sucking into its loud hot vortex just then. Dust mites, dog fur, bacteria, fungal spores, biscuit crumbs, skin flakes, and Mike’s million-and-one weird questions – all congealing in the dark like a giant ball of protein. The meditative movement of vacuuming made me aware of my own thoughts, and how they all gravitated toward Mike. I wondered if living in the industrial area had made him brain-damaged and oddly shaped. I wondered if he was a back or a side sleeper. I wondered if what he’d said about flies was true. I wondered what he dreamt about at night and if those dreams still lived in the mattress. I switched the vacuum cleaner off and lay on my back, bouncing up and down on the mattress and wondering if this gesture was supposed to feel childlike or sexual, and if it was allowed to be both. The mattress had a hard, thin layer on top but was soft below.

#

During my first few nights with the mattress from Mike, I tried to test my theory by closing my eyes and sinking into its memory. I imagined all the people who might’ve slept on it before me. Young and old, fat and thin, men and women, rich and poor, pretty and ugly, black and white, and Mike. I imagined them all like deities; their hours of REM seeping through the fibres, infiltrating my open pores like a blood transfusion. But the image of Mike’s puffed cheeks as he’d squatted to pick up the mattress kept distracting me. It appeared over and over again in my mind, like a GIF.

I drifted in and out of sleep. I was lucid, shivery, and sweat leaked between my breasts. I stripped my pajamas off and wiped my skin with the sheets. My hips ached. It’s just hormonal, I told myself. But under the moonlight poking through my blinds, my body glistened in a way I’d never seen before, like a snail. I felt connected to Mother Nature. Like I was someone on the cusp of greatness; the next Mark Zuckerberg or Buddha. I got up, took a cold shower, and checked Facebook for any messages from Mike. Nothing. I clicked through my old profile pictures and wondered if Mike thought I looked prettier or uglier in-person. I read my mother’s latest Airbnb review. Someone had complained about the wifi connection being “crummy“. My mother had written an impassioned essay in response that I couldn’t bring myself to read. I Googled endlessly about mattresses…

One article said that humans produce roughly one hundred litres of sweat in their beds every year and that this moisture, combined with the heat of a sleeping body, provides an ‘ideal fungal culture medium’ out of mattresses. It was this article that got me thinking, Is consciousness like kombucha? My theory needed serious work – no doubt – but I couldn’t deny that this would be a catchy opener for a TEDx Talk someday. I made a mental note to remember it, then put my hand between my thighs and imagined Mike throwing me down on the mattress.

#

During the day, I developed my theory further. I sat at my desk with fifty tabs open; Googling, downloading papers, watching YouTube videos, making mindmaps and notes. I got up every few hours and ate unwashed celery and chicken nuggets that I warmed in the microwave. When I was stuck with an idea, I did squats in my pajamas and plucked hairs from my top lip and nipples. Small pains made my brain work better, I believed. I knew I got this way about things sometimes. But this time, something was different. I was really onto something quite profound, I could feel it. In a couple of days, I had gathered pages of notes – quotes from sleep scientists, snippets of Object Theory, even a forum post about someone dreaming more vividly after inheriting their grandmother’s mattress. I started sketching diagrams of figures in the fetal position, trapped in mattresses. Like archaeological images of ancient hominin remains. I drew little waves radiating from their bodies and labelled them sleep residue. At one point, I typed the words sleep lineage into Google Scholar and found nothing, which only strengthened my belief in the plausibility of my theory. I looked at scholarships for Masters programs at Oxford and Cambridge. Mike could visit me there, I thought, when he wasn’t laying internet cables. I stalked some professors, sent some emails, and binged on star-shaped melatonin gummies. Pulsating.

A few days later, Mike messaged me on Facebook.

[4.02am] Mikey Mike: cant sleep

[4.02am] Me: same

[4.03am] Mikey Mike: hows the mattress??

[4.04am] Me: [Typing…]

It’s a little hard tbh like my hips hurt lol

[Typing…]

am beginning to doubt my theory:(

[4.06am] Mikey Mike: aish sorry that sucks

u tried melatoning?

what theory?

I have my cable interview tomoro

[4.07am] Me: maybe I just need more time to get used to it

the mattress I mean

do you dream?

[4.08am] Mikey Mike: I dreamt about you last night

[Mikey Mike deleted this message]

Are you going to give me a bad seller review??

#

Night after night, I kept sweating sweat that didn’t taste like mine, kept dreaming dreams that didn’t feel like mine. My hip bones had begun to bruise. I tossed and turned through images I’d never encountered before: Chantelle from PsychicsOfAfrica.com weaving a basket out of fibre optic cables, a Xhosa kid with two laptops for hands, My mother trapped inside her phone tapping the glass with her long pink nails, Port Elizabeth CBD as a giant nest swarming with flies. Was the mattress speaking to me? These images flowed into historical scenes… Fathers in New Brighton being ripped from warm beds in the night, severed from their tangle of limbs, thrown naked into cop cars, swallowed by the night. These fathers became miners in Johannesburg sleeping on concrete, their hands a pillow-shaped prayer they coughed and coughed into. These fathers who became miners became grandmothers clutching their knobkerries beneath their beds, listening for rattles at the window, sleeping with eyes open more restful than not. These fathers who became miners who became grandmothers then became the commuters in the street below my apartment, jumping out of taxis, Score energy drinks in hand, fuelled with sugar and painkillers by 6AM. These people eventually morphed into me.

I stared at the white emptiness of my ceiling.

In a country like South Africa, what could I possibly know of sleeplessness?

#

You would think that by now, I would have begun losing faith in my theory. Instead, I had begun to lose faith in Mike’s mattress. I typed and deleted, typed and deleted, at least ten messages to Mike. In some of the messages, I explained my theory in immense detail with no paragraph spaces. Just like he’d spoken to me that day in my kitchen. Without sense. Without breathing. In other messages, I offloaded my feelings in poetic lines. My genuineness seemed so genuine that it seemed disingenuous. At a loss of how to remedy this, the message I ended up sending was short and to the point. It read:

[2.04am] Me: mattress just not vibing with me anymore. Pls can you come and collect? And any chance of a refund?

[2.11am] Me: Sorry hey

[6.58am] Mikey Mike: no probs!

Mike came by when he said he would. He was in a different car this time and looked taller and buffer than I had remembered. Maybe he’d gotten that internet cable laying job in Europe after all. I changed out of my pajamas, put some earrings on, and buzzed open the gate. He was out of breath when I opened my apartment door, as if he’d sprinted up the three flights of stairs just to see me. I tried not to be flattered by this possibility. He said he was sorry it didn’t work out with the mattress but that if there’s one thing he knew about retail, it was that “the customer is always right”. I laughed. Then there was an awkward silence which made me unexpectedly teary. I fiddled with my earring, then told him I was sorry for the inconvenience, that I wasn’t feeling well, that I might be losing my grip on reality… Mike stared at me with big bug eyes then scratched his armpit.

“It’s the microplastics I rate. They’re in everything these days”, he eventually said. I nodded and wiped my nose on my sleeve. Mike juggled his two cellphones in and out of his pockets, then sent a voicenote to another guy in Walmer who wanted the mattress ‘Asap!’. It was much easier this time, to carry the thing down.