THE SLEEPERS by Matthew Gasda

Matthew's newest novel is coming your way

From the Editor

We’ve got an exciting release coming in the spring. Playwright, poet, novelist—modern master of written word—Matthew Gasda has a new novel, The Sleepers, to be released on May 6, 2025. Preorder it here.

Here are a few words from Matthew about the novel’s thematic origins and its ultimate completion, followed by a few short excerpts to give you a taste of what you have to look forward to:

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An Introduction from Matthew

Fiction is, famously, especially in the Substack discourse, in trouble: underwritten, underread, underbought. And yet, the nostalgia for the time when fiction was otherwise, was exciting, talked out, influential in the United States (basically the mid to late 20th century) is a sign that, even if fiction’s condition is dying, it’s not forgotten. Fiction is a beloved relative surrounded by family members at the hospital–will it hang on?

The Sleepers is a book I started writing, if I remember correctly, in 2017; in the course of many years of off and on again composition and recomposition, it has become a period piece about a liberal Brooklyn couple on the eve of Trump’s first election. While it is a difficult book to excerpt—because details and perspectives are hidden and distributed throughout the text; you need the whole book to put the whole book together; there aren’t really plot heavy set pieces—it is a timely book. It feels like it is about the beginning of the era that ended on Tuesday. I hope you enjoy it.

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Excerpts from THE SLEEPERS

She looked over at the bedroom door and wondered again if Dan was awake.

She began to tap her foot on the floor, as if the surplus of energy in her body could be safely released through the working of a single muscle.

Tap tap tap.

She reached for her phone, which was on the toaster: no messages, only notifications from apps she didn’t use.

Tap tap tap.

She looked at the Sunday Review section of the Times: climate change, rising temperatures, drought in Africa, melting icecaps. She didn’t like being reminded that her life took place inside a thing called History; she didn’t like to be reminded that there were events going on that surpassed the relevance of the things going on in her head by several orders of magnitude. The notion that the world was ending produced devastating melancholia. She imagined droughts, wars, mass migrations, rising seas, incredible heat, dried-up seabeds, and exhausted species slouching towards extinction. Dan dead, sister dead, parents dead, everyone dead; dead pets, dead planets, dead, blue planet: serene and empty.

And yet, all of this, all of that, seemed impossible from her perch in gentrified Greenpoint. There was no ecological crisis, no existential crisis, here. There was just this little table and the little light above it and Dan asleep in the other room. There was something spiritual about it: the sense of extreme intimacy, of being totally alone with another person, of the shared space being theirs, utterly theirs.

She remembered the first night they’d spent there. They’d gotten kebabs from a Turkish restaurant on Franklin Street and walked along the water, before coming back and falling asleep on the couch, exhausted and wine drunk and happy (before waking up in the morning and having sex).

“You’re so fucking insanely beautiful,” Dan had said when they woke up. “Just like–insanely wildly beautiful.”

And she was, or used to be, Mariko knew that. She used to be beautiful. Now she was merely good-looking. The glow had faded, just like that. But she was still proud of the fact that there was that flowering, that moment where one other person on earth had looked at her and found her completely perfect, a kind of miracle. Not everyone could say that, very few in fact.

She stared at a perfume ad, went back to the election. There was speculation about the first presidential debate, which would be next week. 

The actress wiggled her long, irregular toes; her legs were falling asleep. She stretched and yawned. Her brain was so awake.

And what was that—her brain? The shuttling of ions, the flow of blood, the communication of neuron to neuron... the web of interactions that produced this niggling little “I” of anxiety and disappointment. A brain was a failed piece of evolutionary technology; it had all sorts of features that were completely unnecessary. It questioned, picked apart, worried, analyzed; it talked to itself. So much of what the brain did was ancillary to survival.

She sighed, brushed her hair back, massaged the bones on either side of her sinus, half-consciously trying to increase airflow to that brain. 

She was feeling increasingly hungry, but the fridge was almost barren. Why hadn’t anyone gotten groceries? They both had basically been home all day. It was so stupid. She was craving steak—really craving it. 

Blood and flesh.

Mariko was conscious of the fact that she was warding off depression, almost like it was bad luck. She was totally vulnerable to everything, or felt herself to be. There was nothing solid to tether herself to except Dan, who increasingly resented her for depending on him emotionally, insisting on his own brand of aloof, elitist independence. He judged her for everything that she considered totally hers: her life in the performing arts, her emotionality, her friends who didn’t read.

She looked over at the door again: the beige paint was peeling off slowly; in general, there were a lot of things wrong with the apartment, which was basically a classic New York shithole (despite how much work they’d done to make it feel like a home). It affected her psychologically, fed into her already complicated loop of obsessions and emotions—into the feeling that she was trapped.

Her hatred of the apartment had a lot to do with the house she’d been raised in. Her mother was an incredibly fastidious, neat person; her father was basically a slob, whose sloblike tendencies were governed only by a mild fear of his wife’s wrath. Every room, every object, every guest, every holiday was wrapped up in this eternal struggle—each child too. 

It made sense, then, that she would choose to cohabitate with someone like Dan, who was an artful slob. It wasn’t that he couldn’t clean up after himself—he did the dishes, took out the trash, did his laundry—it was that he couldn’t function unless there was a certain amount of sprawl: books, papers, records, sweaters he might put on, shoes he might need to hitch to his feet at a moment’s notice. He needed a certain vibe; his persona was tied up in a certain vibe. Her style of minimalism, he claimed, was soul-sucking; he couldn’t produce deep thoughts in the kind of apartment she wished they lived in.

Mariko stared at the fridge, contemplating whether she should open the last Forager cashew yogurt, add chia seeds and banana. 

The act of eating was calming, even if she didn’t particularly enjoy what she was eating.

There was some other internal force compelling her to stay put and to not get up and open the fridge, however. Was there something to feel guilty about?

There was.

No matter how healthy the snack was, it wasn’t a good idea to eat at night. You should resist the urge; eating late could disrupt your metabolism.

She got up and went to the fridge and took out the cashew yogurt. There were just two clean spoons in the drawer, which meant that Dan had forgotten to unload the dishwasher. Fuck him, she thought, seriously.

The cashew yogurt tasted like shit, but it was better than straight-up carbs.

Was there honey in the cabinet? 

Yes.

She found the honey (raw honey) and took a knife from the drawer. She dipped the knife in the honey and added a dollop to the cashew yogurt. 

Chia seeds? 

Yes.

She took them from the cupboard and sprinkled them in.

It still tasted terrible. 

The banana!

She reached for the bowl of fruit next to the sink, under the window, peeled it swiftly, and began to slice the banana into the plastic yogurt cup, which was really not big enough to fit all the slices of banana, meaning that half the banana was left unsliced and thus potentially destined to go to waste, which made her feel bad. 

The cashew yogurt still tasted like cardboard, but the banana was enough to make it palatable. 

So much extra sugar though. Bad habit.

She reached for her phone on top of the toaster and opened Facebook; she scrolled through her news feed, which was dominated by election commentary.

So obnoxious. 

Mariko’s acting teacher, Yanna, told her that she acted too much with her head, as if she’d planned out each micro-gesture, every subtlety (which was true). Class after class, Mariko was told the same thing, had the same flaw pointed out, and resolved only to hide it rather than eliminate it. She couldn’t act unless she had complete control over what was going on. Intentions were important, they needed to be clear; was she really doing something wrong?

It was a paradox she could never resolve; she never understood how to balance freedom with her own need for control. This problem had become a part of her narrative. She was someone with neurotic tendencies. It was like she had a weak heart or clubfoot. There was no way of separating who she was from the accomplished, secure artist she’d fail to become. 

Her work was always praised, well-liked, even admired and talked about—but it never led to anything, never secured her the professional attention that some, if not all, of her peers from Tisch had received in the decade since they’d graduated together.

Her life narrative had become fractured, put out of joint. She actively compartmentalized the different parts of her life: art, relationship, family, survival job. Each compartment was neatly sealed off, functioning independently of the other. Maybe work frustration would bleed into her relationship, or acting frustration bleed into her relationship with her sister—but, by and large, these critical boundaries were maintained. They had to be maintained.

***

Mariko looked down at her breasts: her robe was open. She looked at her thighs, the unshaven pubic hair poking through her panties, and stared at her stomach, which had just, imperceptibly, begun to bulge, and she felt ashamed, as if someone had opened a valve in her abdomen, her chest, her brain, the backs of her eyes. 

She had lost the definition and tan of Greece, where she had eaten mostly fish, goats cheese, drunk only white wine. Her body had begun to take on the qualities of a city body again: paleness, flabbiness, shapelessness. Yoga in the morning was a must.

Dan leaned forward in his chair and kissed Mariko on the neck. She craned her neck away from him, towards the table, as he continued to kiss her. She put her hand over his face, like a muzzle.

“Stop.”

“Let’s have sex.”

“Stop.”

“I want to though.”

Mariko saw that his cock was pointing straight up, making a tent out of his briefs. She wasn’t used to this, not anymore—

“Please.”

“Where is this coming from?”

“Does it matter?”

It had been almost a week, or maybe even two, since they’d even kissed with tongue. She’d lost track. Had it been a month?

Above all, she wanted to stop feeling so alone, so maybe it would be alright. She could just give in.

God—she wanted to.

Mariko, standing up, sat on Dan’s lap, and their mouths met again immediately, softly; they were trembling. Awkwardly, he tugged at her shoulders, and all at once, they fell together onto the floor.

For a moment, she felt incredibly good, pure, unadulterated joy—chaotic, and basically primal. Here they were, two little creatures, exchanging the last of their love. She was experiencing her own charisma, her physical power to draw—and the refracted, muffled, transfigured expression of their original desire for each other.

***

Dan resented the working conditions of cognitive labor, of content creation: 24/7 focus, 100 percent response rate; omnipresence was the expectation on social media (which was torture). He wanted a place for order, solitude, contemplation, self-effacement; he used to go to The Cloisters on the weekends, but he’d stopped doing that several years ago.

It had become impossible for an English professor to find time to think or read deeply: the irony did not escape him.

A dumbness rose through his brainstem like sap. When was the last time he felt truly awake? When was the last time he felt like he inhabited the body that carried him from place to place, day to day?

The kitchen was stubbornly warm. He hated how September nights no longer cooled down like they had in his youth.

What the body could sense the brain denied. Human cognition wouldn’t act on the sense-data of climate change. That was asking too much. All connection to the mytho-poetic parts of consciousness had been severed. Equinox, solstice: these vitally important days passed by without anyone noticing.

If the sea rose, the place he was living right now would be under water. 

He concentrated on the white spots on his fingernails, bit his knuckle, looked down at the table, at his feet, the floor, as if he were trying to push his eyeballs out of his skull, into the pit of the earth.

He started to think about the $250 check he’d get for whatever he came up with; at worst, he could write something for The Chronicle of Higher Education blog about solitude (or something like that)—the tragedy of distraction and wasted mental energy.

Yet another voice told him that the important thing, now, after midnight, was to be productive: to use these hours of forced awakeness, to convert sleep into verbiage, to be a machine. Dan began to type:

There is one political question which cuts across class, race, epoch: what to do with unemployed young men? There is no part of the country — really, no place on earth — where male youths are not alienated and disaffected, and therefore dangerous. There is no place where there is any clear answer to the question about what it means to ‘be a man’ — and no place where there is any agreement about whether that question is even worth asking.

He trailed off, bored by the sound of his own “voice.”

There was a dog-eared copy of Henry James’s The Ambassadors on top of the toaster; he reached for it, but then stopped himself.

He’d written about James in his first book (which had been based on his thesis). It had been blurbed by three of his mentors, received perfunctory reviews in two minor journals, and that was it.

University of Chicago Press. The name still gave him pleasure, even if the press hadn’t really met his expectations. His next book would be with Verso and there was already a contract. Verso understood what he was about. A radical writer deserved a radical press.

Dan spent a lot of time reading comments on his old articles. He was completely invested in the world, the world of argument and counterargument, the thinking that surrounded the think piece, the chatter that grew, centrifugally, around the dim signal of his ideas. Chatter was better than silence: it told him that he was relevant. 

He considered topics. Capital? Equality? Bernie? These were generalities, but they seemed incredibly fertile, charged with potential. The cognitive effect of the word ‘capital’ was profound: he could feel his brain activate, neurons start to swim.

***

He’d been in therapy for years—since graduate school. He needed to talk: for hours and hours, for years and years. 

The basic position of psychoanalysis was a deeply empowering one. It provided Dan with the space to map his inner landscape. Therapy gave him the courage to explore the shame which had compacted and crystallized within himself (which he located just below his sternum and slightly above his pubic bone—the node in which all his lived experience was stored like fat).

He slipped his left hand under his shirt and rubbed this area, the skin beneath his naval, with his thumb, stroking, directly above his bladder, with his fore- and middle-fingers. He did this unconsciously, finding in three-dimensional space that area that he had located mentally, in two-dimensional space.

He kept typing, as if in a trance.

We need to get rid of the idea that we have a life just because we’re alive.  Nothing could be less true. Nothing could be more antithetical to the spirit of life, in fact, medieval peasants only labored about five hours a day … and that much of the calendar was taken up with holidays. Culturally, we have created the narrative of progress, in order to justify a decreasing average quality of life — in order to justify the horror of monotonous office work. We have longer, richer lives than ever before — according to the measurements invented by economists and politicians. But how much time do we spend in celebration? In the sun? In the fields and trees? How much time do we spend together?

He stopped, briefly touching his cock in an homage to Balzac (who never wrote flaccid) and continued:

American fascism :  the restoration of the pride of the American male via association with Donald Trump’s outrageous phallus. The devotion of the laborer to the capitalist.

The professor flicked over to Facebook, interrupting his writing, as if his brain had said, in effect, “enough for now.” Even late into the night, there was an almost audible hum of activity on Twitter and Facebook: likes, comments, news.

The whole world was being funneled through social media—refracted. Dan’s mind melded with the hivemind; the hivemind melded with Dan.

Sputterings of melancholy and nostalgia. 

The faces of people he would never meet or never meet again.

Time escaped in strange ways, excusing itself like a guest at a party, never really saying goodbye, shutting the door before he could say goodnight; in the hyper-fragmented time of the screen, time was itself a kind of ghost: a hallucination in which you sense that your material, embodied life has continued on without you.

He looked at one of the “stickies” on his desktop:

Marx compares bourgeois society to a sorcerer who can no longer control the powers of the underworld.

Possible book topic. 

But somebody must be writing that book: the book about the transformation of mind into digital-matter. 

The collectivization of opinion.

The algorithmization of consensus. 

Someone a lot smarter than me.

The ultimate (and yet banal) taboo of digital capitalism: that it forces us to exploit each other.

Suddenly: a Facebook message, announced by a water-drop sound. 

hey what’s up?

What the fuck.

The message was from Eliza, a student from the previous fall, who was a junior now. He had received a friend request from her a few weeks before, but that had seemed entirely benign at the time. He probably should have ignored the request, theoretically, but he also didn’t imagine that Facebook friendships had any specific meaning at all; Facebook was too lame to have causal power.

um hi?

He had no idea why he responded, except for the fact that she could see he was online.

Eliza was attractive, however. He had to admit.

He looked through her pictures to confirm his memory wasn’t deceiving him. She was Latina, or half-light-brown skin and hair, discrete curves. She was from New Jersey, he remembered that too; Mom was an economics professor at Princeton. Lazy student though, despite the pedigree. 

hey! I’ve been thinking about your class

o? what exactly?

lots of stuff lol

ok… you know it’s late right now right?

i know. i didn’t expect you to respond right away though, sorry. i stay up late.

so do I

Dan was answering mechanically, and he liked it—liked giving into the very technological mediation he was just decrying. The badness of it felt good; the stupidity of it felt like a release from being smart.  

that’s fun.

yeah so fun Eliza

***

His body was still buzzing, like Pavlov’s dog. There was no meal, just the gentle tinkling of the mealbell. 

The objects in the room were prison guards; they had him under surveillance. He felt judged, attacked, discarded. 

Guilty.

If this was a crisis, a midlife crisis or whatever, it was sure taking its sweet time. It was strategic, patient, willing to be tedious. It would eat up the rest of his thirties and perhaps his forties. He would become one of those men who started having affairs with other men in his fifties, just to shake things up.

He looked at his phone. Nothing from Eliza.

Maybe he should have wacked off: it would have been more relaxing than reading about politics.

He was anxious. He wanted to masturbate so badly. His cock started to swell again, he unzipped his pants, flipped open the laptop, typed, clicked, clicked.

He closed the laptop again, panicked.

Politics and porn. That was the content of his thought. That stuff of his soul. Power and pleasuring twining together.

He was about to look at trans porn. That was what he always looked at. He could scarcely admit it to himself. Recently, that’s what he’d been into. And where had that desire come from? Had it come from porn itself? Or from some latent desire within? 

Shit. 

Was he gay?

It was just a fear. Maybe even more than that, a little desire... an inkling of something—but not an identity. An identity… an identity was more than that; it was a deeper, more complex pattern—not an erratic impulse or a squiggle of desire. 

He was just curious—just letting off some erotic steam. That was what he told himself.

He wondered how many of his colleagues looked at porn; probably all of them, male or female. The hardcore feminists, the queer theorists, the old white dudes: all of them were probably hooked up to the juice, wanking away. 

It wasn’t safe to talk about desire in the university; it never was, but now the tools for catching and punishing desire were more effective. To talk about getting off would have meant violating the expectation that education, that intellectualism, be de-eroticized. The result was the warehousing of sexuality: people in boxes watching other people in boxes. 

He added another aphorism to his blog entry:

Internet porn means producing data so that the Internet can sell you more porn. Watching Internet porn is more useful for the markets than having sex in the privacy of your bedroom because it can be quantified. Porn has nothing to do with bodies. That’s what makes it so great. 

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