Between ten and fifteen minutes after returning to bed, Joel closes his eyes, clears his mind and thinks, Tanzania. He pronounces it slowly in his mind: Tan-za-NEE-a. Then he asks himself why he always starts with Tanzania, since it's a country, not a city. Then he tells himself, never mind, get on with it.
Then he thinks, Zurich.
Then he thinks, Yokohama.
Then he thinks, there is no X.
They once had a babysitter from a Christian college who went on a summer mission to Tanzania, sending out e-mails every few days. She included pictures of the red-dust village where she stayed: simple wood buildings with empty squares for windows and burlap hanging in doorways, small brown kids in faded t-shirts clowning for the camera. Her commentary was surprisingly blunt for someone not even twenty-genuine shock at seeing real poverty, disgust for the corruption that perpetuated it, and refusal to question God's wisdom regardless. The line he remembered, though, described her facetious delight at the variety of meals she could anticipate: "rice, beans, or rice and beans."
But none of that has anything to do with the ritual. It's a private thing, one of the lists he recites in his head when he has trouble getting to sleep. Jamie laughs at the notion of him suffering even the slightest insomnia-he's usually asleep within seconds of turning off his nightstand light. It's even worse after sex. She teases him about it the next day, but he knows she takes it personally.
Three in the morning is a different story. In the time it takes him to shut the bathroom door and urinate, a stray thought can ignite a chain reaction that stokes his brain to full alert status. Staring at the dim rectangle of the towel hanging face-level in the dark above the toilet, he'll recall a simple mistake he made years ago and grind through a complete cycle of recrimination and wishful thinking before he's even washed his hands. He'll slide back between the sheets, lie on his side facing away from his motionless wife, and take note of the time before he shuts his eyes.
Sometimes he falls back to sleep. More often, he opens his eyes and sees that only a few minutes have passed, and decides it's time for Tanzania.
Washington.
Tanzania is an alphabetical list of the world's most important cities, one city per letter, backward. He likes to run the list backward because he remembers when he had his wisdom teeth removed, the nurse told him to count backwards from 100 as she released the clamp on the sodium pentothal tube. He recalls making it to 94, and then nothing. He supposes backward works better than forward because it's less automatic-it makes his brain think at every step, so he's distracted from the fact that he's trying to fall asleep. Forward, ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ rattles off like sprockets on a fast-turning gear, but the tiny mental leaps required to get from Z to Y to X become little gaps his mind can fall into, whence it can drift into tangents and random thoughts and nothingness.
Problem is, he's performed the Tanzania ritual so many times it's threatening to become automatic.
Vienna.
U is hard. He suspects there may be an African or central Asian capital starting with U, but he refuses to resort to the internet, so his best candidate is Ulster.
The ritual has its origins in his dissatisfaction with the allocation of single-letter stock ticker symbols. When he started his new job, it seemed reasonable and appropriate to him that the most important companies should have the distinction of the simplest, most obvious symbols. Some of them did. C was Citigroup. F was Ford. M was Macy's. (X probably should have been Exxon, but he actually thought X was better suited to United States Steel, as if the behemoth's earliest investors predated literacy.) But some of the one-letter symbols applied to companies of utter insignificance. B was Barnes Group, an obscure manufacturer of machine parts, instead of aerospace giant Boeing. D was Dominion Resources, a regional electric utility, instead of Disney. So once in a while he'd find himself creating a mental list of which company each letter of the alphabet would represent if it were up to him. Soon he discovered the list's efficacy at inducing sleep, especially recited backward, and it became a ritual.
