One day he awoke to cough up two perfectly spherical black balls onto the pink of his bedsheets. They were soft and warm and coated in spit, and came out so easily that he thought they had always been there, only to be expelled naturally along the course of one's life, like baby teeth and swallowed fishbones. Still, there was great value (he thought) in the care and inspection of one's body, so when WebMD diagnosed him with cancer for the fourth time he decided to wrap his balls up carefully in two recycled paper napkins (saved crisply from last Friday's lunch meeting) and bring them to his doctor, who had been treating him since he was a young boy.

The family doctor smiled at him sweetly (so sweetly, for it was a long day and she was very tired) and told him in a very soft voice that he would never dream again.

At first he feared some metaphysical tragedy had struck him. He had always done rather well as a boy in school, and he never faltered at turning in reports at work (nor was he so timely as to put his lesser co-workers to shame). Surely this was the kind of incident that poetic justice saw fit in the pithy Japanese novels he liked. But after four or five nights of black sleep, dark sleep, noiseless sleep -- with not so much disturbance as the wee-woo! wee-woo! of the early morning cuckoos -- he came to decide that this was not such an untimely event after all.

He made peace with quiet nights, fell asleep to self-help audiobooks, even quit coffee (replacing it with chai masala in his office's coffee orders; he liked that it sounded so much more sophisticated at the same price). In the mornings he began to let the cuckoo wake him for early morning runs. He even cut out blue light and carbs after sundown. Slowly, and after much deliberation, he relearned how to laugh, not in the way that made sounds from his throat like the water cooler bubbles during his 3pm teabreaks, but in the way that loosened the sides of his jaw, the way that songs are sung, the way that turned heads on the bus. He learned how to cry, too, drying them with 3-ply tissue paper the way he observed his mother did, all those years ago when his father died. All this he deduced in the clarity of day's memory, not in unconscious night, and he was all the better for it.

Decades passed. In the blackness of his sleeps he reflected that people would never change in the way that he wanted them to, and that happiness, being fleeting, could only be experienced in perpetuity. Through that he derived satisfaction, and never found himself wanting again. He grew to enjoy solitude, took up photography after he retired. On his Instagram page (with about fifty likes from various uncles his age and a hundred more from bots) there are twenty-seven posts, the last (posted shortly from his phone exactly twenty-six hours before his death) being a wide-angled shot of the ground somewhere below his flat, the perfectly spherical moon doubled onto the evening pink of the pavement, bleeding (in perpetuity, he captions) into the rain-slicked dawn.