You know that sound.

It’s the sound of the dog about to vomit.

You’re asleep but experience compels you to reach out and attempt to shove the dog off the bed before it’s too late.

But you can’t move. Your limbs fail you as you strain, belly up, helpless and immobile, an upended turtle in the warm, mushy quicksand of a recently acquired Tempur-Pedic™ mattress.

One final projectile hack from the dog and you surrender, defeated by the devil’s own super-foam. You wait away the night fairly certain the dog situated himself away from you.

In the morning you are vomit-free but the public library’s copy of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea has been somewhat ironically caught in the dog’s trajectory leaving the book’s edges just a bit damp.

Stiff from a night spent impaled by the super gravity of the horizontal sauna that is your top dollar closed cell space foam mattress, you manage the strength to rise and shine. Carefully retrieving Sartre from the dog’s vomit, you discover, indented into the mattress, your exact human shape surrounded by what could be called a “body halo” set aglow in the night’s perspiration.

In Nausea, Sartre’s tone is dry with great moments of absurdity among the protagonist’s personal revelations. Fanning yourself with the still somewhat damp book, you decide you will return Nausea, as-is, maybe in touch not as dry as Sartre would have liked, but in tone very dry and very, very absurd.

(Also you will return the book through the library’s unmanned outdoor depository to avoid a potential big philosophical discussion and facing your guilt, of course.)

Satisfied with your understanding of Nausea, and hoping the dog’s feeling better tonight, you wonder in which depository you might immediately deposit the Tempur-Pedic™ mattress.