Sleep and the Soul, page 10
9
“So we factor this term in the denominator ... into what?” Sam turned from the blackboard and looked around the room. “Come on, it’s easy! Anyone?”
Half the class offered no acknowledgment that he’d spoken, while the rest stared back at him uncomprehendingly, as if he’d asked them to compute the square root of a fish. He was facing a new mix of students, but he knew quite a few of them from the runners’ classes, and he knew what they were capable of. “Elena?” he prompted. If she couldn’t answer him, who would?
“You want to cancel one of the terms above?” she struggled.
“Right,” he replied encouragingly. “And that would mean ... ?”
She frowned and shook her head. “I’m sorry. It’s too hard.”
Sam surveyed the room. No one looked sleepy; if anything, they seemed wired, jittery with nervous energy. The holdouts wouldn’t have shown up at all; any ex-runners here must have dutifully taken their pills.
He glanced out the window. Walking to class beneath the blue sky, picturing the same scene repeating for a thousand days to come, he’d been as elated as if he’d returned from the dead. Surely he wasn’t the only one who felt that way?
“How’s it going for you?” he asked Elena.
“What?” She blinked, confused.
“Are you getting used to the new routine?”
Elena seemed lost for words. “Sure,” she managed eventually. “I’m sticking to the schedule.”
In the staffroom at lunchtime, Sam compared notes with his colleagues. “Oh, the runners are hopeless!” Tom declared bluntly. “I don’t know what your special schools were teaching them, but it’s going to take them months to catch up.”
Gloria said, “They do seem to be struggling. Maybe they’re still a bit jet-lagged from the shift.”
Tom rolled his eyes. “Wasn’t the whole point of the magic potion we shelled out for that it was going to bring them absolutely back into synch?”
Sam could only half follow the accounts of the cure; all he knew was that it helped phosphorylate some crucial proteins in the cells of the suprachiasmatic nucleus, a process that the syndrome’s sufferers had lost the ability to perform in response to the normal cues. Sunlight itself still couldn’t imbue them with wakefulness, but if they took the pill in the morning, the biochemical upshot was meant to be the same.
“Everything takes time,” he decided. “Even if it’s only old habits that they’re fighting. A few more weeks, and they should be back to normal.”
That night, the news showed thirty-eight people in handcuffs and orange jumpsuits paraded before the cameras in Shanghai. Prosecutors were claiming that they’d conspired to adulterate a fire-retardant chemical that had been applied to tens of thousands of different products: clothes, toys, furniture. If that was true, the cause of the syndrome might eventually be eliminated worldwide, as all the polluted items were identified and destroyed.
Or just preemptively destroyed. Sam kept Emma distracted while Laura went through her room with a garbage bag.
“What’s it like, seeing all your friends at the same time?” he asked. She’d hardly talked to him for the last few days, but however resentful she was at being pressured into taking the zeitgeber, the silent treatment couldn’t last forever.
“They’re not my friends anymore,” Emma replied.
Sam smiled at this hyperbolic declaration; playground politics could be tough for nine-year-olds, but the grudges rarely lasted long.
“Why not?” he asked.
She turned to Sam with a listless expression. “No one’s the same as before.” Her voice was flat; the last thing she was being was dramatic.
“I think the ex-runners are all a bit ... ” He didn’t know quite how to finish that. No one was dozing off, or zoning out. But everything seemed to be harder for them.
Emma said, “Before, it didn’t matter if it was day or night; we had our own sun inside us, and when it was up, it was brighter than the old one. Now you want us to pretend we don’t see it anymore.”
“It’s a big change,” Sam conceded. “It will take time to adjust.”
Emma smiled thinly. “The pills say wake up, and we wake up. We won’t ever fall asleep at the wrong time again. But it’s like being an animal in a factory farm, pushed along between the rails, going wherever you want us to go.”
Sam’s gut tightened. “You don’t mean that. Everyone has to follow some kind of routine; that’s hardly the same as being in prison. You’ll get used to it again. You just need to give it time.”
Emma gazed at him defiantly for a second or two, but then the energy she’d summoned ebbed away, and she turned back to the TV.
10
Laura shuddered fitfully, a sign that she was dreaming, but then she became ominously still. “Aren’t you ever going to sleep?” she asked Sam, exasperated. She turned to the clock beside her. “It’s a quarter past two!”
“I’m sorry.” He didn’t quite know how he managed to disturb her just by lying motionless beside her, but her ability to sense his wakefulness even as she slept only made the prospect of him joining her even more elusive. “Do you want me to move into the office?”
“Don’t be stupid. Those days are over.”
“Maybe they shouldn’t be.”
Laura raised herself up on the pillows and stared at him. The room was almost in darkness, but Sam’s eyes had adapted and he could see her face well enough.
“We can’t just give in to her,” she said. “It was one thing when she had no choice – and when the whole world was willing to accommodate the runners. But if she goes back to it now, it’ll ruin her life. What kind of job could she have? What kind of family?”
“And if we’re crushing all the joy out of her, what will that do?” Sam didn’t want to believe it himself, but he saw it on the faces of the other ex-runners every day.
“This was her thing,” Laura replied. “It made her feel special, and now she’s missing it. It’s like when they moved the children out of London into the countryside during World War Two, to escape the blitz. It was an adventure while it lasted, but now it’s just ... rationing and austerity and having to be normal again.”
Sam couldn’t deny that there might be some truth to that. Even in his early twenties, the freedom to stay up all night had seemed sweeter than any other perk of adulthood. If he’d been granted the same ability at Emma’s age, it would have felt like he’d conquered the world, and he would never have given up the power willingly.
“I’m not saying she’s dishonest, at heart,” Laura added. “But she’s nine years old, and she wants what she wants. When I was ten, I faked an illness for three months, without a moment’s compunction. Everyone thought I was an angel back then, but I would have said anything to get my own way.”
At breakfast, as Sam poured himself a third cup of coffee, Emma glanced at him knowingly: The pills say wake up, and we wake up. But unlike him, she’d slept through the night; he’d tiptoed into her room to check, afraid he might find her on the floor making sketches in the dark.
At school, his lessons went like clockwork, and not in a good way: he read from his notes, and transcribed them to the blackboard, barely thinking about what he was saying. His students dutifully wrote it all down. He didn’t pause to ask any questions, as much afraid that he’d lack the concentration to frame them properly as he was that nobody would offer an answer.
In the staffroom, he sat at a table by himself, staring at the noticeboard on the opposite wall, not so much drifting toward sleep as hovering on the verge of a waking hallucination.
Someone clapped him on the shoulders. “You look like shit,” Sadiq announced cheerfully, pulling up a chair.
“But I showed up,” Sam replied. “That’s what we do, isn’t it? Because everything would fall apart if we all just followed our own rhythms.”
“Yeah, very funny. I’ve got to admit it, you proved me wrong: you and your friends made the whole thing work.”
“We did, didn’t we?” Sam managed a bemused smile. “The Apollo missions, the Manhattan project, Bletchley Park ... and the runners’ schools.”
But the government was never going to let them start up again. It was an open secret that they’d paid their share of the ransom, and whether or not they ever managed to claw the money back from the prisoners’ scattered cyptocurrency accounts, they expected that to be the end of it. No one wanted to hear that the cure that cost so much was worse than the disease. Sam didn’t want to hear it himself.
That night, exhaustion broke the spell: he fell into bed at nine and slept soundly, until Laura shook him awake at half past six. He hadn’t even heard the alarm.
His newfound clarity only made his classes more disturbing. He obtained an official list of ex-runners from the office, so he wouldn’t be relying on his own experience of who he had and hadn’t taught before – and the deficits they were suffering as a group went from anecdotal to indisputable. These kids showed up, more convincingly on some levels than any sleep-deprived caffeine zombie, but ... screw the somnograms and the body temperature charts from the clinical tests that had given the green light to the zeitgeber, because his students were not okay, however wide-eyed and ambulatory the pills rendered them.
When he raised his observations with Laura, she was skeptical. “Just because Emma’s not the only one dragging her feet doesn’t mean there’s anything more going on here than a collective sulk.”
“Really? You think my seventeen year-olds – with university admission and job prospects at stake – are willing to shoot themselves in the foot ... because they want to spend their nights, not at wild parties, but with me or some other teacher, talking about exactly the same things as we talk about by day?”
Laura was unmoved. “Some might be sulking, some might just be suffering from the disruption in their routine: a change of school, a change of teacher. You don’t have any evidence that it’s anything more.”
And Sam still wanted to believe that she was right: that the world would be restored to order, soon enough, just so long as everyone kept their resolve and didn’t pander to a few ungrateful runners.
“Are you feeling any better?” he asked Emma, on the drive home.
She didn’t answer. He glanced at her; she was gazing out the passenger window. “Did you hear me?”
She said, “Will it make any difference what I say?”
That stung. “Do you think I don’t care about you?”
“I think you don’t listen. I told you what it’s like, before, but that didn’t change anything.”
There was nothing self-serving in her tone; just a chillingly wary disillusionment. Sam didn’t believe she was trying to manipulate him, spinning him stories out of some childish desire to break the shackles of bedtime. “Tell me again. Tell me how you feel, right now.”
Emma took a while to reply. “I feel like it’s the middle of the night,” she said. “As if someone woke me up and dragged me out of bed, and everyone around me wants to do daytime things, but it’s not the time for all that. And even if I wanted to join in ... I can’t! I can’t just pretend and play along with them. I don’t have the energy.”
“So you’re tired?” Sam asked her. “Right now? As if it’s midnight?”
“Yes,” she agreed. “Tired, but not sleepy. That makes it worse. Even if I lie down in bed, I wouldn’t be able to sleep. And I know that when I really want to be reading, or talking to my friends, or playing, the sun will go down and the lights will go out and I’ll fall asleep before I can finish my thoughts that I couldn’t even think before, in the daytime.”
“Okay. I think I understand now.” Sam’s insomnia messed him up, but it always went away in the end. To have your body going through the motions, day after day, while you were trapped inside, never able to bring yourself into synch, would be a kind of torture.
“I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you,” he said.
Emma shrugged wearily. “So what now?”
“I don’t know,” he confessed. “But I’m not giving up; we’re going to fix this. Just let me find a way.”
11
Laura was the first hurdle; Sam couldn’t even think about backing away from the “cure” if he didn’t have her completely on board.
But Laura needed solid evidence; she’d convinced herself that Emma’s testimony alone could never prove anything. Sam was at a loss to imagine how he was meant to prove what none of the labs testing the zeitgeber had even noticed, with all of their expertise and equipment. Then again, they might have been instructed not to look too closely.
It came to him at night, as he stared at the digits of the bedside clock. The idea seemed so simple and right that he closed his eyes and let the afterimage fade, sinking into the darkness, before he could start questioning it. If there were obstacles, he could find them in his dreams.
When he woke, he hadn’t changed his mind. He waited until Laura emerged from the shower, and he explained the plan while she was dressing.
“It sort of makes sense,” she conceded reluctantly.
“That’s not good enough,” he pressed her. “Either you commit to this, or you tell me why you won’t. No going back on what it means after the fact.”
“I can choose the time? Without warning either of you?”
“Yes.” Sam wasn’t sure if she really believed he’d try to cheat and contrive the outcome, but he was happy to banish any opportunity for doubt.
Momentum was building on another front: the older ex-runners were beginning to disappear from his classes, taking their fate into their own hands. Sam wasn’t ready to join them yet, but he’d already had oblique enquiries from some of his ex-colleagues from the runners’ school. Just because they couldn’t use the same building didn’t mean it would be impossible to start again.
Laura bade her time, to the point where Sam began to wonder if she’d lost her nerve and decided to renege. But then, on the fourth night after they’d spoken, she shook him awake.
“You’ve covered the clock,” he observed, amused. She’d also taken his watch from the bedside table.
“That way, you can’t give her any secret signals.”
“Like Clever Hans?” Sam asked mockingly.
“What?”
“The horse that did arithmetic.”
“Don’t start. Are we going to do this?”
They walked together in the dark to Emma’s room, and Laura knelt beside the bed.
“Darling? Can you wake up for me, please?” She touched Emma’s arm and waited for her to respond.
“What is it?” Emma asked. Her voice was thick with sleep; she sounded like any child woken in the night. Sam’s confidence wavered. He’d committed to the experiment as much as Laura; if it failed, he’d have nothing left to argue.
Laura said, “I just want to know, can you tell me ... what’s the time in your head?”
Sam felt the darkness tipping. If Emma really was still a runner, in some deep place untouched by the zeitgeber, she would still be on the old schedule. But if it was all a ruse, a bid for attention, she’d have long ago forgotten what she was meant to be feeling, at some unknown hour with no clock in sight.
“Ten past ten,” she replied. “In the morning. And I wish I could get up and go outside, but my legs won’t let me.”
Laura started weeping as she handed Sam his watch. The second row of digits she’d summoned from the app read 10:13 AM. “I’m sorry,” she told Emma. “I’m so sorry!”
Emma said, “It’s all right. But can I please stop taking the pills now?”
CRISIS ACTORS
1
“Every year that you delay your midlife crisis adds another two years to your lifespan. That’s just simple arithmetic.”
Carl laughed, but his father’s demeanor remained entirely sincere. He hadn’t meant the remark as a joke.
“I’m long past the halfway point,” his father added stoically. “But there are higher harmonics where I still have the chance to intervene. There are peaks and troughs that represent every fraction of the human lifespan, and quantum mechanics teaches us that we can modify the shape of those waves, nudging their phase and changing all kinds of outcomes that used to be seen as inevitable.”
Carl’s first impulse was to bite his tongue and try to steer the conversation back toward reality without starting any arguments, but then he noticed the jar, as big as an ice-cream tub, sitting on top of the bookshelf behind his father’s armchair.
“It doesn’t teach anything of the kind,” he said bluntly. “How much did you pay for that crap?”
His father turned and followed his gaze to the jar of Harmonic Advantage Supplement. “None of your business. And when did a degree in geology make you an expert in quantum mechanics?”
“It doesn’t,” Carl replied, “but I did enough undergraduate physics to know the basics. You didn’t specialize in the history of England, but if some conman on the internet told me that the order of succession to the British throne was decided by a series of MMA cage matches, I’d be willing to defer to your own education when you assured me that that really wasn’t true.”
His father groaned. “So you think Fourier analysis is as much of a joke as Mixed Martial Arts in the Palace?”
Carl walked over to the shelf and picked up the jar. He’d been looking for a price tag, but he found himself morbidly skimming the spiel on the side. “I studied Fourier analysis, too,” he said. “You need it for seismology, among other things. And I can tell you with the utmost confidence that it does not say that your life is ‘built from harmonic waves’ or that you can ‘postpone the final node’ by taking pills full of ‘micro-crystalline quartz’. Now, there’s something I’m qualified to talk about. This is sand. You’ve bought a big tub of sand.”
“Yeah, yeah, like that’s nothing special!” his father retorted. “Except that this sand has been kept out of the light for thousands of years, building up energy in its crystalline defects. If you don’t believe that, maybe you should hand back your degree, because it’s precisely the science behind the most sophisticated methods for dating ancient artefacts.”
