The Man Who Never Sleeps Project

Visiting the human world became a regular pastime. I ventured there approximately once every two months. It was a danger sport to me, like rock climbing or bunji jumping to you humans; and I was getting a taste for it. At first I went only with Spaper, but eventually I ventured there alone. I explored the city, or I would dally with our group of human friends. Spaper and I constantly sought out new experiences worthy of our enthusiasm. We went to concerts of many kinds – orchestras, folk concerts, punk rock, hip-hop, disc jockeys, opera and ballet. We went to see movies, football matches, boxing matches and races of all sorts…until we needed to be involved in the action.

A young human with a crewcut and an unshaven chin answered the door. He looked casually at Spaper and said, “Hey, bro’”. Then he went back inside and sat down. He was playing a game on a Sony Playstation. I followed Spaper in.

Life went back to normal. I moved money from the computer and spent time with Marietta. The hype that Toby created was forgotten and I only had parties with, or visits from, the people in my own social set. Nate and I went sailing, horse riding or hunting; or we drank, smoked and played backgammon with our other associates. I was, in fact, reminded of how bored I was with life in general before Toby had come.

Dear reader, I expect you’d like to know who I am. Who is this man who can kill your kind off at his leisure? And why do it? Allow me to explain.

Perhaps a week into Chaz's absence I bought a newspaper with the headline, “Woman Murdered In Street”. The accompanying photo filled just about the entire front page. It showed a rainy city street, and the dead woman being whisked away on a stretcher. Police officers were all over the scene. The photo actually gave the impression that the photographer had to find a gap between cops to take the shot.

I’ll start with the man named Charles Aaron Darf, or `Chaz’ to those who knew him. I met him in Adelaide in August, the year 2000. I’d just moved into a unit in Glenelg for a hundred and forty-five a week -- a lot of money for somebody who was on the dole. But it included electricity, water and furniture, and living in Glenelg would save me money on transport. Besides, it was just what I wanted. The building had two stories that comprised nine units all up. Apparently it was no less than a century old and had originally been a brothel. I could imagine that when looking at the layout – thin corridors, dimly lit, with dull and identical doors all along them. The foyer was thin and long, the floors and staircase always creaked.

Undergrowth.org presents THE MAN WHO NEVER SLEEPS A novel by Levin A. Diatschenko

Trespassers wouldn't understand.

Synopsis

If you take thought as a tangible thing, imagine the clouds of thought hanging about our heads.
Imagine the roof of thought-fog hanging over our cities.
Beginning as a murder mystery the story unravels until it gradually unveils the origin and purpose of an organization so esoteric that it doesn't even have a name.

Lars Yenin is an overworked family man, who never gets enough sleep. When he loses both his job and family, he lies down to sleep and doesn't wake up. The mysterious coma continues for years. Two weeks into the sleep, another man who looks identical to Yenin arrives and takes over Yenin's life. Within a short time, he becomes a world-famous occultist.

This new Yenin never sleeps at all.

Chaz Darf is a sorrowful emigrant whose only enjoyment in life is art. Most of his days are spent smoking cigars on the front steps of the block of units where he lives. Nobody knows anything about his life before he came to Australia.

When Chaz goes missing, and murders of seemingly supernatural circumstances take place, the police are left with only one clue: Chaz's paintings, which clutter up his unit. Every painting is of the same subject: a beautiful but deformed woman. That's not much help, though. What the police need is the help of an expert in the occult --- they go to Lars Yenin.

The Man Who Never Sleeps is Levin A. Diatschenko's first novel, a blend of metaphysics, mystery and science fiction. Since its launch in the Darwin Fringe Festival, followed with its nation-wide distribution, it has attracted an underground following of readers as diverse and individual as the characters in the book.

During the months of August and September, The Man Who Never Sleeps will be released in a serialised form on www.undergrowth.org, featuring new illustrations by the author throughout. Readers will be able to subscribe to a special email list to receive updates when new chapters are uploaded weekly at http://www.undergrowth.org/neversleep.

A preview chapter of the book's prologue is now available. Read the prologue here.

The revolution begins at breakfast!

Reviews 

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`…who threw their watches off the roof to cast the ballot for Eternity outside Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads everyday for the next decade.’ – Allen Ginsberg.


`The Mind is the great Slayer of the Real. Let the Disciple slay the Slayer.’ – H.P. Blavatsky




Seeing that our once small and esoteric order is becoming larger and more public with each year, I have decided to write an account disclosing its origins and founders of which I am one. Of course, in reality, the order began many ages before our births -- back with the first human to ever achieve freedom from his lower nature. That moment of initiation was the true beginning and no mortal is the founder. But what I offer here strictly relates to the modern movement: our particular push and our current task. I trace it back to one man in particular: Lars Yenin. People often express to me their suspicion about Yenin because his early life was in no way similar to his later life. It is, someone once told me, as if he were two different people.

Funnily enough, that isn’t so far from the truth, which Yenin revealed to me himself in great detail. Let me elaborate:

During the last months of his `old life’, Lars Yenin had a midlife crisis. Others saw it as a negative phase, but he perceived it to be a rare moment of clarity. His family and friends advised him to take some rest, and then `climb back on the horse’. But Yenin saw them only as distractions. His job was monotonous and was never enough to free him of his financial worries. Just when he was beginning to get on top of things, a national holiday would turn up or his car would need registering, and Yenin would have to pay more money out. His family obligations were a source of constant anxiety. He could not help notice that his hair was going grey, and his body was becoming softer and flabbier.

It came to a stage where Yenin felt that all his anxieties, his worries and desires, could be likened to tentacles -- latching onto him and pulling him deeper into the rat race that was society. They even affected his sleep. He had to pull against these emotional tentacles in order to relax enough to get to sleep, and rather than just waking up anymore, these tentacles would drag him out of the dream world and back into the rat race when morning came.

As a result of this, Yenin did not get enough sleep. Say, for one hour of sleep he missed out on in every night; that would be seven hours of sleep that he still needed at the end of a week. Returning from work, Yenin would look at homeless people on the street and he’d think to himself, “How easy it would be to stretch out next to them and just let everything slip away.”

Then everything fell apart in a day. That morning Yenin went to work and attended an important meeting. He was informed along with many others that the company could no longer afford to keep him. When Yenin arrived home he discovered a note left by his wife explaining that she’d left him and took the children with her. It had been brewing for a while, but nevertheless it shocked poor Yenin. He felt incredibly old. Then, after fretting about his misfortunes for half an hour, Yenin suddenly stopped and had a realisation: for the first time in many years he had nothing to do. It was almost freedom. He could have set about finding a new job, but he pushed that thought away and went for a walk to the bottle shop on the corner. The rest of that day Yenin sat at home and drank bourbon with his stereo turned up. When the bottle was empty he decided to catch up on some sleep.

It was only after dropping onto his bed that Yenin realised just how tired he was. He loosened his collar and belt, stretched out, and trying to swipe away the `tentacles’, he drifted off to sleep.
It was a deep and dreamless sleep.

Later, he drifted back into a half-conscious state and vaguely realised that he must have slept for hours. Perhaps I should get up now, he thought. There are things to do. But he was still very tired and felt more peaceful than he had ever been; so he swiped away that last `tentacle’ and went back to sleep. This was the day that Yenin completely let go. The hours stretched on and on. The telephone rang and people knocked on the door, but he remained asleep. The hours stretched on until they became days -- and the days stretched on. Nothing could wake him now. Yenin was cashing in on all the overdue sleep he had ever missed out on -- with interest. Although he was completely unaware, the days turned into weeks … then months … then years. And the years stretched on into centuries….

Nobody with any relation to him knew that Yenin slept for that long. This is because while he was sleeping – in fact, only two weeks into his sleep – a new Lars Yenin appeared. This Lars Yenin was fifteen years younger than the first Lars Yenin. He staggered home deliriously one night, collapsed onto the bed next to himself and fell unconscious. He was soaked from head to foot and he was bearded. But nobody knew those details either. All that his associates knew was that at around that time, when “Larsy” lost his job and his wife took the kids and left him, he became an entirely changed man.

For a start he renounced everybody he ever knew. Nobody saw him anymore. When they called, he was very short in explaining to them that he was busy. They thought, as you would, that this was because of his recent losses. When a group of his old work buddies finally decided to confront him at his home, they found he had moved out and left the house to his wife. And she had not met with him face-to-face since they broke up. For six months after that, there were occasional rumours of Yenin sightings, as his old friends called them. People said they saw him drive passed on the road, or at the airport, or in a crowd. He looked different somehow, said the rumours. Maybe he had a face-lift to make him look younger, and something was wrong with his right eye. Maybe it was not Yenin but actually his illegitimate son – that would explain why his wife left him. Either way, by then nobody really cared anymore.

All the while, the first Yenin kept sleeping.

About five years later, the second Yenin became a millionaire and moved into a country property. Whenever he moved anywhere, he would cart around the sleeping Yenin too, so that nobody would discover him and cause trouble. He had an underground room made at his property especially for the first Yenin to sleep in, safe and undisturbed. It was at that time, when the new Yenin was financially secure, that he began his work in the new psychology. The Yenin I shall tell you about here is the second one. The original Yenin is asleep during the entire discourse of all the events that follow.
The second Yenin never slept at all.

to be continued.

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