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These are, respectively, the first sentence of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and the last sentence of Henry Roth's Call It Sleep. Each centrally keys into the title (and a governing trope) of its particular text; each locates its subject precisely. Ellison's protagonist speaks to us from within a state which he calls “hibernation”; David Schearl takes leave of his readers by entering into one – what the penultimate sentence tells us we “might as well call …sleep.” I want to read these two remarkably contiguous moments alongside each other for a moment before I proceed to a discussion of exactly what such reciprocal facing of texts might entail.