Sleep and the Soul, page 31
In the distance, the elevator pinged. Luke switched off his computer and headed for the exit.
When he passed Ray, it was clear that his presence didn’t register, so he called to Elaine up ahead, “Your turn on duty tonight?” She glanced at him briefly, but didn’t reply.
He stood and watched as Elaine moved from cubicle to cubicle, while Ray pushed the cart and collected the trash. Not only were they both ignoring him, neither was checking on the other.
Luke coughed loudly, to no effect. Surely they couldn’t have both taken the pill on the same night, by mistake? But whatever was happening, he couldn’t leave them like this.
As they proceeded through the office, he followed them, scanning for dangerous obstacles and trying to decide who he should wake. If he could remember their schedule he might be able to guess who’d be the least tired. But maybe the whole problem was that they’d broken the pattern for some reason, and ended up confused themselves, in which case he might as well give up and toss a coin.
“Look out!” he called to Ray, who was walking straight toward a chair someone had left in the middle of the passageway. Ray did nothing to acknowledge the warning, but he picked up the chair and slid it under the desk where it belonged.
Elaine turned to Luke, glassy eyed as an animatronic mannequin, then broke into a smile. “Relax! I’m watching him.”
Luke wasn’t comfortable spouting obscenities at someone who might have been his mother, so he smiled back sheepishly. “You really had me there. I thought I was going to have to hang around all night, then drive you home in the van.”
Elaine shook her head, still amused, but perhaps a tiny bit repentant. “I wouldn’t have let it go on that long. You have a good night, Luke.”
“You too.”
In the lobby on the ground floor, Luke saw a bottle of disinfectant lying on the carpet, probably having fallen off the cart. He picked it up and placed it at the side of the exit, where it would be easy for Elaine to spot when they were on their way out.
6
When Luke arrived at the gym, it was deserted and pitch black, but his keycard opened the door and the lights near the entrance blinked on. As he walked to the locker room, panels brightened then faded in his wake.
He changed out of his office clothes and put in his earbuds, but then wondered if he should abandon his plan and just make the best of the situation. He could still use the equipment – wide awake – for half an hour or so, as he’d done for the last four visits, then go home and try to grab an ordinary night’s sleep. There were machines here that could crack his skull open if he did something sufficiently stupid, but even if he just dropped a dumbbell on his foot and bellowed in pain, that might trigger alarms and prompt some human review of the security camera footage.
Then again ... all his somnambulistic actions at home had been entirely free of slapstick. He had no reason to believe that he was likely to insert his hand into a weight stack, or wander around naked in a public area. He didn’t know if the videos people posted showing themselves skateboarding, cycling, and driving were all fake, but to the extent that he could filter out the obvious attention-seekers, the consensus of the online discussion seemed to be that most sleepwalkers followed the same instincts and cues as they obeyed in waking life.
He swallowed the pill, then lay down on a bench with his rolled-up towel as a pillow. After a while, the lights went out.
7
Luke woke in a shower stall, with the water still running; he shut it off, dried himself, and stepped out just in time to cancel the alarm on his watch. There were two other men in the locker room, and they ignored him completely, with nothing in their body language to suggest that they’d noticed him earlier doing anything unusual. He’d contemplated leaving his phone propped against the wall, out in the gym, to try to record his night’s activities, but though the customers here made videos of themselves all the time, surveilling the entire floor for hours would probably have crossed a line.
He left the locker room and glanced around the gym; it wasn’t quite the morning peak yet, but there were at least twenty people present. What had felt slightly daring when the place was empty seemed downright insane now; he might as well have been sleepwalking through a crowded shopping mall. What if someone had asked him how long he’d be using a machine – gesturing first for him to turn down his earbuds – and he’d just stared at them as if they were beneath contempt?
“Hey!”
Luke turned warily to face the speaker – a wiry man a few years older than him, pounding a treadmill – and braced himself for a tirade. The runner made a thumbs-up sign and gasped, “That was epic!”
“Thanks,” Luke replied, hoping his grimace of confusion might be mistaken for a kind of self-deprecating grin. He checked the tracker on his watch; ten minutes earlier, he’d been on the treadmill immediately to the right of this man. Ten minutes earlier – and for two full hours before that.
The tracker couldn’t tell him his speed; he might have jogged slowly, or he might have just stood there like a fool. Luke approached the treadmill, and hit the button to bring back the data for the last session. He’d run thirty kilometers.
“Did you doubt your own eyes the first time?” his neighbor joked.
“Yes.”
The man hit the stop button and mopped his face with his towel. “I’m Karim.”
“Luke.”
“You know you can get the treadmill to send the log to your watch automatically?” Karim went into a menu on the touchscreen in front of him. “Just pair your watch with your membership number, and it will do it every time – for any treadmill, in any of the clubs.”
“That’s cool. Thanks.”
Karim shook his head. “Thirty K? I might do that outdoors on the weekend, but ... a two-hour run before work? Where the fuck do you get that much energy?”
Luke said, “It’s a mystery.”
As he walked to the station he certainly felt the aftermath of his unintended feat, but though he was sore in places, and ravenous, he wasn’t weary in the slightest. He grabbed breakfast from a stall on the concourse, and arrived at the office feeling invincible.
As he booted up his computer, he knew the Keller problem would soon begin to take its toll. But what mattered was not whether this strange elation lasted forever; what mattered was whether he could acquire it again. The tracker had shown him eschewing the use of most of the gym equipment, and just doing his body-weight routine in the uncluttered stretching area before jumping on the treadmill. Notwithstanding a million staged YouTube videos of painful mishaps, this model’s default was to slow automatically if you failed to keep up, and even if you lost your footing, the whole design was curved and padded to limit the harm to a runner who tripped and fell. So, as far as he could tell, in his whole night at the gym he’d really done nothing unsafe or imprudent.
If this was what he needed to stay sane and healthy, so be it. Other people got drunk or high, or had the time to blow off steam while fully conscious. His own drug was safer than aspirin, and all it made him do was run in his sleep.
8
Luke gazed placidly at his computer’s desktop, wondering why he felt so peaceful. When he looked away, Samantha caught his eye and asked, “Are you still in the zone?”
“Sorry?”
She laughed. “I think that counts as a no. What’s with the big grin, though? Did you finally slay the monster?”
“Umm ... I’ll get back to you on that.”
It was a quarter to ten. What had he been doing all morning? Had he overslept and started late? But it was Friday, so he would have been coming from the gym. The last thing he remembered was falling asleep there the night before.
He reached under his desk; when he opened his gym bag, the towel was only slightly damp, so he hadn’t showered any later than usual. When he checked his computer’s log, it showed that it had booted at 7:07.
Luke opened his folder for the Keller project. There was a new version of the data analysis notebook, last modified at 8:23, and a new report, dated 9:40.
He opened the report, and skimmed through it. All the error bars had shrunk, by a factor of five. But ... how, exactly? Luke compared the current notebook with the previous version. He’d changed a single line in the function that performed the wavelet analysis, replacing one variable by its square root. Why, though? How did that make sense?
His email client pinged; there was a message from Keller, replying to one that Luke had sent at 9:42.
“Finally!” Keller had written. “Well done!”
Luke scrolled down to his own message, but he’d just attached the report without comment. He had come into the office still asleep, stared at the notebook for an hour, made one change, stared at it for another hour, then generated a report based on the new analysis and sent it to Keller.
He went back to the notebook, and the altered function. If he examined it carefully, he ought to be able to settle the matter decisively: either the version he’d been using before had been wrong, or this new one was. But when he tried to engage with the details, it was like trying to do mental arithmetic with thirty digits – his brain just snickered and said, “Nah, that’s not happening.”
Keller would check everything and make his own assessment. If Luke had screwed up, he’d get another reprimand, and maybe then he’d summon up the courage to walk away from the impossible task. But there was no point second-guessing the report, now that he’d sent it.
He forced himself to stop dwelling on the matter, and started catching up on some of the work he was meant to be doing alongside Keller’s project: assessing drone survey data for hints of lithium-bearing pegmatites. It was a subtle and demanding job, but his other boss, Graham Hunt, didn’t expect him to work miracles. An automated system had made a first pass through all the observations, but Luke could see dozens of cases where its verdict was clearly wrong.
By a quarter past five, Keller hadn’t followed up on his first response to the report. He probably wasn’t even in the building anymore. Luke shut down his computer.
“Are you actually leaving?” Samantha asked. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before.”
“Yeah, very funny.” Luke gathered his possessions.
“Some of us are having drinks at O’Brien’s,” she said. “Around six.”
“You know I don’t drink,” he said. “And I’m starving. I just want to get home and eat.”
Samantha groaned. “It’s a figure of speech; we go there for a meal as well.”
Luke hesitated. “Doesn’t everyone hate me already, for not coming before?” He’d genuinely never felt able, but all his late nights in the office had probably made him look poisonously ambitious.
“No one hates you!” Samantha scoffed. “We all remember how hard it was getting started here. Just ... come and meet people properly.”
“You said around six?” Luke had no idea what he could do until then.
Samantha said, “Yeah, but you can get there early and grab a table for the rest of us. It’s the least you can do, now that you’ve decided to start slacking off.”
9
In the pub, Luke mostly kept his mouth shut and listened to his colleagues joking with each other. He hadn’t watched most of the shows they were referring to, but at least he hadn’t stopped following the news, so not every quip went over his head.
Half an hour into the gathering, Samantha’s sister, Kaitlin, showed up, and Luke squeezed over on the bench to make room for her to join them.
“Have we met before?” she asked him.
“I don’t think so.”
Samantha said, “Luke doesn’t get out much. He’s chained to his desk.”
“Oh, that’s sad,” Kaitlin teased him.
“So what do you do, that gives you so much free time?” Luke asked her.
“Theatrical management.”
“You’re an impresario?”
“An impresario’s assistant’s assistant’s assistant,” Paul interjected, with admirably crisp enunciation. “Assistant ... assistant’s ... assistant,” Gareth added, making no effort at all.
Kaitlin gave them the finger. “I practically run the office.” She turned back to Luke. “So why are you chained to your desk so much?”
He said, “I got stuck on something, but I think I’ve sorted it out now.”
“So you’re celebrating your freedom?” Kaitlin suggested.
“Maybe. Or maybe on Monday I’ll discover it was all a dream.”
“Are you free tomorrow night?”
Luke hesitated, not quite sure what he was committing to. “Yes.”
Kaitlin said, “I’ve got some complimentary tickets to the Threepenny Circus.”
“Boo!” Gareth shouted. “Stop whipping those tigers!”
Kaitlin sighed. “There are no animals. It’s just acrobats and performers. It’s half circus, half burlesque.”
Luke was on the verge of retorting that burlesque was in the running for the most pretentious artform of the twenty-first century, but he swallowed the jibe. No one cared about his opinion, and he didn’t want Kaitlin to look at him and see another Gareth.
“So, who wants to join me?” Kaitlin asked.
10
Luke shifted restlessly on the unfamiliar mattress, and felt his shoulder make contact with warm, bare skin.
Even as the sensation jolted him awake, he did not pull away in shock; at some level, the situation felt entirely natural. It had been nine months since he’d broken up with Alison; why shouldn’t he have found someone else by now?
But he had no idea where he was, who was beside him, or how he’d got here.
He remembered arriving at the theater, and meeting up with Samantha and Kaitlin in the lobby. He remembered the start of the performance: a singer in a large purple wig, belting out sub-Brechtian schlock while they hung upside down from a trapeze. Maybe he’d dozed off; who could blame him? And though he hadn’t taken a pill, it had been less than 48 hours since his previous dose.
The room was not in total darkness; a streetlamp or a neighbor’s security light cast a patch of illumination on the floor. Luke rose as quietly as he could, found his clothes and started dressing.
The mattress creaked. “I thought you were staying.” Mercifully, the voice was Kaitlin’s – not Samantha’s, or some complete stranger’s.
“I promised my parents I’d have breakfast with them,” he lied.
“Okay. That’s cool.”
He glanced toward her, then turned away, discomfited by her nakedness and proximity. But he sat on the bed while he put his shoes on, aware of how strange it would look if he tried to do it standing up. Had they used a condom? He hadn’t been carrying one. If they’d staggered here blind drunk, at least he would have had an excuse to ask Kaitlin to help him fill in some gaps, but under the circumstances he suspected nothing would freak her out more than if he began confessing to a lack of certainty about everything that had transpired between them.
“I had a good time tonight,” Kaitlin said. “I didn’t think you’d be so into it!”
Luke spent a moment pondering this before he realized she probably wasn’t talking about the sex. “Well, it was ... different.”
“Oh, come on, you were cheering as loudly as anyone.”
That chilled him; just how Machiavellian was his sleepwalking self? He’d come along to the performance in the hope that it would lead somewhere with Kaitlin, eventually – but would he have been so shamelessly dishonest, awake?
“And it was nice, when we were talking afterward,” Kaitlin added. “Most men can’t shut up about themselves, but I could tell that you were really listening.”
Luke made a noncommittal sound that he hoped she’d take the right way, whatever that was. His mind was reeling now; he couldn’t decide if his alter ego was Patrick Bateman or Chauncey Gardiner.
“I’ll see you,” he said, as he approached the door, not daring to face her directly.
“Okay.”
He seemed to be in a shared house, on the ground floor; he walked down a corridor and found the front door. Outside, he checked the map on his phone; he was in Hurstville. The railway station was fifteen minutes away, but it would be another hour until the next train.
As he walked along the street, almost trafficless except for the occasional speeding reveler with sound system blaring, he tried to laugh the whole thing off. Kaitlin was a grown woman with her own fully developed bullshit detector, and they’d hardly be the first two people in history who’d ended up in bed after one of them had feigned enthusiasm for a terrible live show. Neither of them had come to any harm.
But he couldn’t pretend, now, that the only thing his Fibrofilamide side would try to do was rescue him from couch-potatohood. It wanted to fix all of his problems: work, health, love life. He suspected it was closer to an amiable simpleton than any kind of scheming pick-up artist, but then, the corollary was that its intervention in the wavelet algorithm was probably not down to some brilliant scientific revelation to rival Kekulé’s dream about the structure of benzene. Maybe it had gleaned just enough from his hundreds of hours staring at the problem to know how to fake success in a way that he would never have dared to do himself.
It was embarrassing, but it wasn’t the end of the world. On Monday, he’d steel himself and explain to Keller that he’d made a mistake.
By the time he arrived home it was almost three AM. He took the last remaining sheet of the blister pack of Fibrofilamide, pushed out all the pills, and flushed them down the toilet.
11
Luke waited outside Keller’s office for almost an hour before he caught him emerging.
“Excuse me, do you have a second?” He’d emailed Keller three days ago, asking if they could meet, but he’d received no reply, and this seemed less discourteous than spamming his inbox.
