Stone, I'm telling you: enough is enough.
"You want to sleep, is that it?"
I start telling him what that's like, how I imagine trying to shut down all the control levers — on a wall that extends as far as the eye can see — banks upon banks of levers, all classes of levers but particularly the large fork levers, the kind you use to throttle back a Pratt & Whitney F100, drop the landing gear, and cross into deep space; and then every specie of button and engine light, along with edge switchers, network switches, toggle switches — the kind you'd see on the mahogany dash of Uncle Ducky's 1960 Mark IV Jag — rounder switches, dials, rockers, everything clicking and whirring as the turbines wind and whine down, even as the fans go on zooming, cooling things off, subsidiary motors purring, the whole taxonomy of ever smaller devices in decline, the rackety-clack of valve lifters banging their heads ever more quietly, disks spinning down, and down, look at the spin I'm in, that old black magic, those old clocks trotting along on the grass, out the train window, screens blackening, old-fashioned flash bubs popping; the last crackles of a rotting fire.