Sleep and the Soul, page 37
“We’re not there yet,” Rafiq observed glumly.
The driver said, “So how about we try to keep it that way?”
7
Omar was slapping his own face to stay alert when, between the thwacks, he heard a scraping noise coming from in front of the house, and several voices trying unsuccessfully to whisper.
“Uncle, wake up!” he said.
Rafiq didn’t stir; Omar prodded his shoulder and repeated the plea, until Rafiq opened his eyes.
“What’s happening?”
“I think someone’s trying to steal the car.”
They made their way to the living room together without switching any more lights on; there was enough illumination to see where they were going, but Omar was afraid for a moment that the dimly lit figure in front of him might turn around and reveal a new face.
Rafiq, still Rafiq, peered out through the blinds and sighed. “I don’t think they’ll have much luck, but they’re going to leave a few scratches.” He’d welded brackets onto the doors with holes for some very large padlocks, the shackles too thick for most bolt-cutters.
“They might break the windshield,” Omar fretted.
“Not without a sledgehammer.”
Omar moved closer to the window and tried to position himself to get a glimpse between the slats without losing sight of Rafiq. There were four youths standing around the car; two were trying to prize open the front door with crowbars, while the other two stood guard, holding baseball bats.
The streetlights were bright enough to show their faces. They all seemed giddy and elated, reveling in the excitement of the act – while making no effort to keep each other in sight. Omar had visited households where the inhabitants had gone solo, but most had been as glum as the transient residents of a short-stay boarding house. He had never seen a group like this, enthralled by a common purpose but entirely oblivious to each other’s identities.
“Someone’s watching!” one of the guards announced. He must have noticed his companions’ unexpected stability; he looked around, scanning the street, but then settled on a closer target.
“Get back!” Rafiq whispered. As they retreated from the room there was a shattering noise; Rafiq pulled the door closed behind them, then took hold of the handle. There was no lock; if anyone tried to come through, it would be down to his grip on that piece of metal whether they were kept at bay or not.
“I should have put bars on all the windows,” he lamented. Omar listened to the thugs laughing and yelling, but it didn’t sound as if they’d braved the broken glass and climbed into the room.
After a few minutes, the voices went silent. Rafiq opened the door; the living room was empty. “We can clean that up in the morning,” he said. “Then start on the bars.”
As a temporary measure, they moved a table into the hallway and tied the door handle to it with several loops of wire. Omar’s heart was still racing. The street had always been quiet before. He’d never heard of a single neighbor being burgled.
“We might as well swap now,” Rafiq decided. “You sleep, I’ll keep watch.”
Omar lay in bed with his eyes closed, replaying the event in his head. As rattled as he was, he couldn’t deny that alongside his fear he felt a trace of envy. He wasn’t going to weep like a child because he missed Bruno and Tuan, but the prospect of never walking down the street with anyone he could talk to the way he could with them felt like a kind of torture. And if he could never hope to have an ordinary friend again – one with whom he shared a history – maybe the car thieves had the next best thing. They had made a plan and committed to it, regardless of exactly who was standing beside them.
But the more he dwelled on the notion of a camaraderie so pure that it transcended every comrade’s identity, the more he began to recoil. He had no problem delivering food to neighbors he’d never see again, but reducing his whole life to a piece of theater so generic that anyone could step into the roles would just be a new kind of nightmare.
And he hadn’t even witnessed the version with an endless flow of understudies: while he’d watched the thieves, the same four actors had remained together in a single troupe.
If he could do that, unwittingly – if he could bind four people together when they would otherwise have drifted apart – what else could achieve the same result?
He’d fantasized about looking down on the city from space – and for all he knew, a satellite engineer somewhere might be working on exactly that project. But in the mean time, there had to be smaller steps that ordinary people could take.
8
“Are you trying to get five Michelin stars from all your lab rats?” Martin joked, as he started on the lunch Rafiq had prepared.
“Of course,” Omar replied. It was a simple meal, but anything home-made was more enticing than the canned food most people were relying on, and with the aroma of freshly baked bread lingering, perhaps it did seem like a moment of artisanal luxury.
Valerie was more subdued, but she seemed just as satisfied with the food. Omar still wasn’t sure how he’d managed to lure these two solos off the street with nothing but a promise of bread and hummus and an earnest declaration that it was all in the aid of science. Maybe they were both carrying knives, and were confident that they could fend off any attempt by three other strangers to harm them. Or maybe they’d been longing for a chance to carry out exactly this experiment themselves.
When they’d finished eating, they all went into the living room. Omar had set up his computer with the webcam positioned to capture a view of the two armchairs facing in opposite directions. He started the video recording software, and turned to the participants to reiterate the instructions.
“Please just sit in the chairs in silence. Don’t talk to each other, don’t look at each other. It will only be for five minutes.”
“Have you got something I could read?” Valerie asked.
Omar said, “Sorry, I don’t want to complicate things with extra objects.” A woman reading could only be replaced by another woman reading, and the control subjects the previous day had not been allowed any distinguishing props.
“All right.” Valerie steeled herself. “See you later, then. Or at least ... someone with the same plan.”
Omar followed Rafiq out of the room, into the back yard – far enough away that nothing about their own presence ought to be detectable by the participants.
“If you can keep a couple together by having them sit in silence with their backs to each other, you should probably start a marriage counseling business,” Rafiq teased him.
Omar said, “If they fall for each other, I’m taking no credit. You did that, with the food.”
Rafiq smiled. “My cooking didn’t keep the controls together, did it?” He’d taken some persuading to go along with the study, but now that they were actually doing it, he’d become as enthusiastic as Omar.
Omar checked the time on his phone, the only thing it was good for. “Still three minutes to go.”
“If you want to pass the time, do sixty pushups,” Rafiq suggested. “I’ll count them for you.”
“No, they’d hear me breathing a mile away.”
“Ah, there’s always some excuse. With no school and no sport, you really need to keep fit somehow.”
Omar hoped this was just faux-parental nagging about his general well being, and not a desperate preparation for a state of dog-eat-dog anarchy. The bars on the windows had made him feel safer on one level, but seeing the same thing all around the neighborhood had left him with a dismaying sense that all the fortress-building might become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
When the five minutes were up, they returned to the living room. A man and a woman were sitting in the chairs, facing away from each other, but they bore only a superficial resemblance to Martin and Valerie.
Omar walked over to the computer and tore the masking tape off the indicator light beside the webcam. It wasn’t lit. He forced himself to stay calm, and addressed the couple quietly. “Thanks for taking part. Do you mind telling me exactly what you were told would be happening, by the other experimenters?”
The man recounted the spiel he’d been given. The woman’s version was phrased a little differently, but both followed the same basic idea as Omar’s protocol. They’d never seen each other until he came into the room and released them from their promise, but at least they hadn’t ended up in the house for some entirely different set of reasons.
Rafiq said, “Thank you, we really appreciate your help.”
“So, this was a control, right?” the woman asked. “To test what would happen if you didn’t switch the camera on?”
“Exactly.”
As he closed the front door, Rafiq turned to Omar. “Does that count as a failure?”
“It doesn’t count as a success.” Maybe Martin and Valerie had remained together in another version of the living room, thanks entirely to the camera Omar had switched on – to the delight of another team of experimenters ... and perhaps their confusion, too, if they’d been aiming for a control – but he had no evidence about it, either way.
“So we try again tomorrow.”
9
As Omar walked down Gleason Street, the wind blew a stream of flyers past his feet. He squatted down and picked up a handful.
“Anything interesting?” Rafiq asked.
There were two copies of the Solidity Manifesto, in a bilious green that was probably the result of someone with no black ink left in their printer trying to make do with a color cartridge whose magenta had run low.
There was a proclamation under the “Emergency Workforce Act of 2028,” requiring the members of a list of professions to show up for their jobs, while also compelling the public in general to provide “aid and sustenance” to anyone they “reasonably believed” to fall into the same categories. Omar had no idea if a parliament somewhere really had managed to convene and pass this law, or if the whole thing was just a well-intentioned hoax.
And there was a poster of a man wanted for murder, though it was not clear from the text beneath the mug shot whether the poster’s creator knew for sure that the man portrayed was on the loose, or whether they had felt obliged to release his replacement from their own custody, and had glumly assumed that their counterparts, wherever their suspect had ended up, had done the same.
Rafiq stopped reading over his shoulder; he’d spotted a potential volunteer. “Excuse me, sir,” he called out to the solo. “We’re trying to see if we can keep people together just by using video cameras. Would you be willing to take part in an experiment to test that?”
The man stopped walking, and beamed at them delightedly. “I absolutely would, but in return you need to be part of my own experiment.”
Rafiq was taken aback. Omar asked the man, “What are you testing?”
“Brick biographies.”
“Ummm ... ?”
“I’ll show you,” the man insisted. “It will only take two minutes; my house is just around the corner. Then I’ll come and do your camera thing.”
Omar looked to Rafiq. It wasn’t impossible that a solo had formed an elaborate plan, as part of some Ship-of-Theseus gang, to lure people into an ambush – but he was asking for less trust than the two of them had asked of him.
Rafiq said, “Sure.”
The man introduced himself as Evan, and true to his word, his house wasn’t far. They followed him inside, and he led them to a room that looked like it might have once served as a nursery; the wallpaper bore a motif of bears holding balloons. But it contained no furniture now. Arranged on the bare floorboards were dozens of bricks, spelling out the message: MY NAME IS EVAN CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS. BORN 8 SEPTEMBER 2002. MY WIFE ALICE BORE MY SON GRAHAM ON 15 APRIL 2028.
Rafiq said, “I’m sorry about your family.”
“Everyone’s lost people,” Evan replied. “This isn’t a plea for sympathy; I’m just trying to set down an anchor.”
“When did you do this?” Omar asked.
“Yesterday. But I only finished it last night, so I haven’t had a chance to see what effect it has.”
“At least it was still here when you came back,” Rafiq noted.
“Yeah. But now I want you two to come back here tomorrow.”
Omar said, “Of course. But we can’t ask you to join our own experiment now; if you stay connected to us, we won’t know if it’s the camera or the bricks.”
Evan was disappointed, but he accepted the argument, and they assured him that they’d still honor their commitment.
They returned to Gleason Street, and after half an hour of begging they managed to persuade two other solos, Kieran and Daniel, to join them.
Back at the house, the four of them shared a meal together, then Omar started the recording, sending the video app into the background so its window no longer showed on the screen.
In the back yard, Rafiq said, “No one would keep doing controls forever, would they?”
Omar had no idea, but as far as he could tell he’d always encountered people whose history seemed unexceptional. This was only their third trial, so it would not be all that strange if some other experimenters were still running controls. But by the fifth trial? The tenth? If the webcam was still refusing to stay on, it would start to look as if the universe was going out of its way to mock them.
When he walked down the hall and turned into the living room, he saw that Kieran and Daniel were gone. He checked the computer; the web cam light was on, and the video app was still running in the background.
He halted the recording, and addressed the two strangers. “Thanks for taking part. My name’s Omar, and that’s Rafiq. Can I ask if you came in here together?”
They had already turned to face each other, and they were grinning with surprise and delight.
“Yes we did,” one of the men replied.
The other nodded. “It looks like it actually worked. I’m Colin, by the way.”
“I’m Pedro,” the first man added.
“Do you want to see the replay?” Rafiq asked.
The four of them sat and watched the recording. Omar felt a chill as a young cheekbone-thief squatted in front of the camera finishing the setup, while a middle-aged man stood in the doorway; despite all the family photos, he’d never seen a home movie of any of the house’s other occupants before. But what really mattered was that Colin and Pedro had been paired from the start. And they hadn’t cheated, they hadn’t messed with the protocol. They both looked bored out of their skulls, but they hadn’t spoken, or turned to peek at each other, for the entire five minutes.
“So far so good,” Pedro said. “But how do you scale it up?”
“We’re going to need more experiments,” Omar said. “And a way to send video wirelessly. I’m hoping that if we start recording from two cameras into one video file – like a split-screen – then people who start out in the same place and wander around separately with the cameras pointed at them will still be together when they return.”
“Do you have that kind of equipment?” Colin asked.
“Not yet,” Rafiq replied. “But if you spread the word about what happened here, it might reach someone who can take the whole idea further straight away.”
10
They managed to get four jobs in the afternoon, all of them paid in food. Omar went to bed tired but happy. Maybe the camera trick was nothing when judged against the scale of the disaster, and he might as well be celebrating finding a roll of duct tape while the house was dragged up into the sky by a tornado, but for now he didn’t care. He’d tamed one tiny whirlwind, and he wasn’t done trying.
When he woke, he could tell without opening his eyes that it was still night. He could hear Rafiq, over by the desk, breathing irregularly in a kind of controlled sobbing.
Omar thought about rising and trying to comfort him, but what he could say? The success they were both so proud of wouldn’t bring either of them closer to their families. If their most grandiose dreams came true, and people ended up pinning the whole world down the way it used to be, that would almost certainly mean that everyone remained lost and scattered – with a chance to put down new roots, but no hope of recovering the old ones.
11
“That’s the house, isn’t it?” Rafiq asked.
“Yes,” Omar affirmed. “Number 93, I remember.”
Rafiq knocked on the door. After a minute, a young man Omar hadn’t seen before opened it, barefoot and bleary-eyed.
“Can I help you?”
“We’re looking for Evan,” Rafiq explained. “He asked us to drop in this morning. I hope it’s not too early.”
The man said, “I’m Evan.”
The three of them stood in silence for a moment.
“Is your birthday the 8th of September?” Omar asked.
“Yes. How did you know that?”
Rafiq said, “The bricks. I mean, someone else who put the bricks down showed us.”
Evan digested this. “Why don’t you come in?”
He led them to the nursery. The wallpaper portrayed rabbits, swallows and acorns, but the mini-biography in bricks was exactly as Omar remembered it.
“You didn’t show this to anyone yourself, yesterday?” Omar asked.
“No,” Evan insisted. “Has it changed for you?”
“No,” Rafiq replied.
“So it works. Up to a point.” Evan regarded his handiwork despondently.
“Maybe if you add more detail,” Rafiq suggested. “It’s hard to write much with bricks, but I bet if you carved letters deep enough into the walls, they’d persist.”
“Maybe.”
As they left the house, Rafiq seemed to warm to the idea himself. “We should do that. The cameras look promising, but we need to try every method we can think of.”
Omar couldn’t argue with that, even if it felt stranger than ever to imagine sharing the house only with those cheekbone-thieves who also shared his name and birthday. “I wonder if any genome sequencing labs are still operating,” he joked.
