In my regular life - the one I call 'real' - I go to sleep every night at 8.30pm. My body gets me up as soon as it is light and, by the time darkness falls, I'm starting to lose consciousness, fast. All the corners of the night, therefore, everything associated with the sleeping world, is as foreign to me as Antarctica. In my regular life, I know the time so well that I can tell the hour to the minute without looking at my watch.
Under jet lag, however, all that is thrown into convulsions. Not just the steady routine, the sense of clear divisions, the ability to get on with the world, in sync with it. No, something deeper is dissolved. I get off a plane, 17 hours out of joint, and tell naked secrets to a person I know I don't trust. A friend starts talking about her days - her plans, her friends, the things she wants to do - and tears start welling in my eyes, in a restaurant. I can't sleep at night (because I've been sleeping in the day), and so I try to go through my routine, as I might in the daylight world. But I write the wrong name on the uncharacteristically emotional letter. I shower the stranger with endearments. When the lady at the bank offers me a $3,000 credit for the $30,000 cheque I've given her (a large part of my yearly income), I smile and say, 'Have a nice day'.
I often think that I've travelled into a deeply foreign country under jet lag, somewhere more mysterious in its way than India or Morocco. A place that no human had ever been until 40 or so years ago, and yet, now, a place where more and more of us spend more and more of our lives. It's not quite a dream state, and yet it's certainly not wakefulness; and though it seems another continent we're visiting, there are no maps or guide-books yet to this other world. There are not even any clocks.
I live these days in Japan, and my mother, who is in her seventies, lives alone in California. Every time I want to look in on her, therefore, I get on a plane and take the 10-hour flight across the Pacific. But for a week - at least - after I arrive, I'm not myself. I look like myself, perhaps, I may sound something like myself, but I'm wearing my sweater inside-out and coming out from the unremarkable movie Bounce embarrassingly shaken. I'm not the person I might be when I'm antic or giddy or have been up too late; I'm a kind of spectral being floating above myself.
Every time I fly back to Japan, I become the meridian opposite of that impostor, a Sebaldian night wanderer who can't be trusted to read or write anything for at least another week. If I visit my mother four times a year, therefore - a reasonable thing to do in the ordinary human scheme of things - I spend eight weeks a year, or almost a sixth of my life, in this nowhere state. Not quite on the ground, yet not entirely off it.
A day, a human day, has a certain shape and structure to it; a day, in most respects, resembles a room in which our things are ordered according to our preference. It may be empty or it may be full, but in either case it is familiar. Over here is the place where you rest (10pm- 6am, perhaps), over there the place where you eat or work or feel most alive. You know your way around the place so well, you can find the bathroom in the dark.
But under jet lag, you lose all sense of where or who you are. You get up and walk towards the bathroom and step into a chair. You reach towards the figure in the other bed and then realise that she's 7,000 miles away, at work. You get up for lunch and then remember that you've eaten lunch six times already. You feel like an exile, a fugitive of sorts, as you walk along the hotel corridor at 4am, while all good souls are in their beds, and then begin to yawn as everyone around you goes to work.
The day is stretched and stretched, in this foreign world of displacement, till it snaps. I sleep, and sleep again, and the dreams that come to me, suddenly and violently, seem to belong to someone else. A Buddhist scholar (whom I've never met in life) is talking to me about transience, I'm talking of a house burning down, I'm slipping into a back room at a wedding with a long-ago girlfriend. Every one of the dreams, I realise when I awake, is about the dissolution of self. Of course it is, my more settled, sensible self will tell me, your sleep itself is jangled. You've been hurried into the next room of consciousness before you've had a chance to pack. You're falling into unconsciousness in the middle of a sentence, with the TV on, and all the parts of you undigested.
And yet, somehow - such is the state of the spell - I can't hear this voice in the place where now I find myself. My stuff has been stolen - and stolen again - and I am suddenly bereft. A woman is speaking perfect English to me (though we are on the streets of China), and I know, somehow, that she speaks like this because she grew up in Fiji. A parade of ladies of the night walks past, and the woman, in a Chinese cafe, asks me what I should do about my stolen things.
When he was a boy, I recall, Rudyard Kipling awoke one night with a start, and realised that he'd been walking in his sleep. All the way through the dreaming house and out into the garden, as the light came up. 'The night got into my head,' he wrote, and soon thereafter became the laureate of Empire's troubled sub-conscious, all that happened on the dark side of the camp.
I go out again, as obscurely proud as a child who has climbed Everest before breakfast, and greet the figures streaming off the boat - it is Bangkok now, 6am - as they go to work. Vendors selling chilli with meat, or mint leaves, and, on the far side of the river, monks paddling from home to home in the early light. At each house built above the water a woman bends down to give the monks an offering of vegetables and rice.
The last taxis slipping back towards the suburbs. The girls finally leaving the discos and clubs and heading back to the shacks where they sleep across the river. The city caught by surprise, going about its private rites while the bulldozers, churning, in the little lanes, all the neon now turned off, grind back and forth, back and forth, removing the evidence of night.
Because jet lag is so much a part of my life now, I tell myself I will make the most of it -attend to it, enjoy its disruptions, as I would those of a geographically foreign place. When I return to my mother's home, therefore, I go out at first light for lunch, and enjoy seeing my hometown as I have never seen it before: the smell of kelp above the fast-food stand, the pungent tang of the sea that will disappear once the day is under way. People returning from parties, or the graveyard shift, others going out into the day while it is still virgin: all the people I never see in my ordinary life.
And when I return from California to Japan, I return by way of some strange Asian city - Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, Hanoi - and, for my first few nights of discombobulation, prowl the dark. Were I to go to anywhere that resembled home, I'd be keeping everyone up by going out for lunch at 3am -and would, in turn, be thrown out by them as I turned in for a good night's sleep at 11 in the morning. So, embracing the traveller's first rule - everything is interesting if you look at it with the right eyes - I use the sleeplessness to try to see a world, a self, I would never see otherwise. I step out of the airport in Singapore, though in Singapore it's easy to feel as if you've never stepped out of the airport: everything is so spotless, so streamlined, that the entire city feels as if it's a line of duty-free stores, and man-made rainforests, set along landscaped streets. A visitor always feels he's on a tour bus in Singapore, even if he's alone - being guided around the sights of the Singapore Story film that is screened for tourists at the airport round the clock.
Under jet lag, though, another city comes forward, as if the 21st-century construct were peeled away to reveal something more odorous and ancient, less domesticated. The last few tubes of pink fluorescent lighting are still on in Little India, where the women sit on rattan chairs in evil-smelling doorways and look out into the dark. The temple pythons who guard the unmarked alleyway, and offer good luck, are gone now for the night, but the joss sticks still burn beside the candles in the Chinese shrine. The vendors sell potency pills and dildos from their wheelbarrows. Groups of men circle around, muttering, pushing one another, and now and then, in a bout of intoxicated courage, one of them steps forward, into the room, and states a price.
Along the shiny malls of Orchard Road - the new, official Singapore, where Barnes & Noble and Marks & Spencer and Nokia and Nike all share a single entrance (there's a Starbucks on this intersection, a Starbucks on that one) - tall girls who weren't girls when the day or the decade began flounce outside the Royal Thai Embassy, walking up the sidewalk, walking down it. The only other figure in sight is Ronald McDonald, seated on a bench, one arm extended, surveying the outlines of what seems a burger paradise. Farther down, along the water, the faces of Manchester United and Chelsea follow me as I walk along a strip of bars, their neon lights reflected in the canal. African men are disappearing down a street of bobbing red lanterns, where the international phone-call centres have the over-bright clarity of provincial police stations.
I see a woman, standing at a window, arms folded, in a long black backless dress, staring out into the night, and then, coming round, I see that it's a mannequin. A White House official is reading from a text about the war on an oversized screen above the steps that lead down to the disco called Underground. Outside the clamorous bars of Orchard Towers - Crazy Girls, Sex, the Ipanema World Music bar - the taxis are lined up, 40-strong and the waitresses smiling at you as the doors of Country Jamboree swing open are all wearing ten-gallon hats. It could be Singapore, of course, but it very likely isn't.
© 2004 Pico Iyer
