Offenders against the system – a label earned for the smallest infraction – were punished with (unmedicated) sleep deprivation. The daily Potium fix was withheld from them.
Over the weeks in which these ‘final touches’ were rolled out by our ‘specialists without spirit’ – gradually and as inconspicuously as possible, such that they seemed just more of the same but kicked up a notch – I watched from the sidelines and could scarcely believe my eyes. Nor did having my sight intact help me see how what were, to all appearances, steps taken in the dark could end up where they did, somewhere so fantastically precise – unless, that is, they were steps on a well-worn path down the abyss of history.
The people, meanwhile, before being wolfed by the state, had no choice but to swallow such propaganda whole, half-knowing that the idea behind it was not their happiness and well-being, but, rather, their heartless exploitation.
‘At least they don’t all gobble it up. It still has to be forced down their throats,’ Chevauchet jeered half-heartedly, as though feeling sorry for his targets. ‘Some still manage to quack out orations on the dignity of man. You know things are bad when the last shred of hope is a quacking duck! Quack of a duck! Quack-quack!’
Those who got on board voluntarily, ci helped look the other way. But the worst by far – the deadest ducks of all – were the token ‘agitators’ who blamed sloth and sleep for getting us into a Catch-22. Chevauchet foresaw a special place in hell for these ‘useful idiots.’ They were no better, and did more damage, than state apologists. ‘We weren’t vigilant enough,’ they cried. ‘We failed to sound the alarm to stop the seizure of power. But now we’ve been swung to the other extreme. This imposed wakefulness is our well-earned punishment. We didn’t act when we still could. Narcoleptic children of Palinurus, we fell asleep at the helm, thinking instead of acting. And we lost control of the ship. We were not conscious enough to steer it. We were not awake enough to think. And now we are too awake to dream,’ they scribbled, meekly sipping their daily dose of Potium.
Chapter Thirty-Four
One morning, I sat down in my habitual spot, feeling distinctly spectral and light-headed. I did not feel my body, but seemed to myself rather like the upright shades inhabiting the Fortunate Isles in Lucian’s True History. Neither could I, going over in my mind our travels of the past year, tell those that were real from those that were imaginary. After all those waking hours spent with Chevauchet, I could not say for certain where dreams took over from reality and when they receded, or even which of the dreams were ‘mine.’ On this score, my memory failed me. But distinguishing between the real world and the dream world all of a sudden became important – clear in principle, if not in practice, to one not in the habit of self-policing.
In retrospect, I could see that my concern to know at least what was actual, genuine, or material arose from changes I had observed in Chevauchet. There were striking incongruities in his appearance and bearing. It began with glitches. In an instant, his face could morph from white to crimson, round to long, or his hair, ordinarily grey and straight as a die, curl and darken, as if animated. He would sometimes fade into the background, becoming transparent. Every so often, he turned on a dime without warning and reversed direction. And once, to my stupefaction, he advanced recti-linearly in cartwheels, displaying a level of agility one would never suspect in a man well into his seventies.
I put these momentary distortions of his image down to Prohibition. Although I concealed it from him, I worried lest he degrade further, or break down completely, and disappear from one day to the next.
We did have at least one serious conversation about the way things were going. It was he who brought it up. He was aware that his days were numbered. And time was running out for Onirica, unless he found a successor. Even at such moments, his wry sense of humour did not leave him:
‘Only homo somnians could dream up homo laborans, this “new man” of theirs! If I am untimely, it’s because the times are unmanly! All I can say is: lucky me!’
More troubling than his apparent incoherencies were the snags in his speech, which would become garbled or slurred; he might as well have been speaking a foreign language, for I could not make out anything. All I had then to orient me or get me out and back to the safety of my own consciousness were his gestures, as slow as a sloth’s or as quick as a stealing monkey’s, and the modulations of his voice (he maintained presence of mind throughout). At other times, lacunae formed, down which his words tumbled never to be reclaimed, or his speech simply suspended, as if words were failing him, and then, just as abruptly, fell over themselves to get out, sped up to the point of unintelligibility. When I first mentioned these events to him, he was nonplussed. Later, resigned, he would shrug and say ‘they couldn’t be helped.’
What of my own state? Peering back at me in the mirror were two dark-ringed globes, bleary and glassy like stagnant wells or ponds. I looked ill and underslept. But when I moved closer, I saw I had sleep in my eyes. And I felt fine – well, maybe somewhat depressed. Was the face in the mirror, then, my real face, or was it me through the haze of a dream – as in a looking-glass that was perpetually foggy? Was my breath still strong enough to fog a mirror? I wondered and brought my lips up to it. I breathed and blew on the glass until it began to turn opaque, clouding over. And as the mist dissipated, I saw something flash within it, like the scales of a fish that has come near the surface, or the gleam, in a dream, of a fulfilled wish.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Approximately two years after I met Chevauchet, we put our heads together to retaliate against Prohibition. The result was ‘Operation Dormitory.’ We had found a country house, close by yet isolated, large enough to sleep several dozen souls, and attainable entirely via an underground tunnel from the centre of the city (during the Great Public Works, the entrance was overlooked and never sealed off like the rest). Sleep was about to become illegal. What better moment to start organizing a resistance? In our minds we saw a reprise of the Maquis.
The practicalities took some figuring out. I had no qualms about benefitting personally from our endeavour. To charge for sleep was also the only way to signal its value. It would, moreover, allow me to be my own boss and work for a lost cause I believed in – possibly the last such cause. Since the circulation of money was tightly monitored, there was no question of taking any. The currency I honoured was local and outlawed. But it was payment in kind into a shared, mutual account. For the goods I received enabled me, and hence all who came to me, to survive.
Those who bought what I offered – rest – were desperate, husks of different shades, kept going by a cocktail sure to drive them mad, if it did not kill them first. They made enough to be able to ‘afford’ sleep from time to time, which is to say, they worked harder and all the more efficiently, in part thanks to furtively microdosing on sleep, in part because the idea of sleeping more by being able to buy more sleep pushed them to keep going at double speed, until, exhausted, they dragged themselves to me, untrackable below ground, vanishing like stones in water in central Paris, having taken every precaution and confident that they were not being tailed.
For them, I was the superfluous man, the invisible man, the disillusioned dreamer who had literally gone under.
As far as I know, I was the only ‘Merchant of Sleep,’ a sobriquet that stuck with me. What I sold was intangible and contraband. Though secret, it was not secrets. Though new, it was not information or news – nothing of the kind. I lent my clients the ‘means of production’ necessary to make what they needed to live. This means was a decent bed. What they ‘produced’ there was not a commodity. That made me a rentier, a hotelier. You could also say that I ran a workshop. But the goods leaving it were not the result of ‘work’ (contrary to what some would have). And, though ephemeral, they were inalienable from their ‘producers.’ These had it within themselves to make, in the safe space I provided, out of materials I did not provide, whatever their hearts desired and had time to spin.
Chapter Thirty-Six
In the factories, the desire to visit my Narcopolis formed like an escape plan inside a prison: meticulously, undeviatingly. The invitation and directions to the tunnel were passed down in Chinese whispers. But since this was not a game in which the exact message is eventually divulged, most who received it erred and never found their way, and the few who did I knew I could trust: they were serious, prudent, and attentive. Like a psychopomp, I led them into the underworld, and they followed me willingly to the ends of sleep.
Our meeting point was a cemetery, the Bastard family tomb. Its wrought-iron fence with finials of poppyheads was left open, the grille having been cut, and the mossy steps down through the burial vault were concealed by a slab that could be moved easily. If accidentally discovered, the mine shaft would attract only daredevils, served right by the treacherous deep. In the collective consciousness, the underground was life’s sable lining, the literalization of hell, the concretion of eternal sleep. Old atlases of the subterranean network showed its reticular venation extending hundreds of kilometres. The charts had last been updated decades ago by amateur cataphiles; they were notorious for their errors and imaginary excavations, non-existent corridors that entrapped and confounded the casual, unseasoned explorer. To add to the fear they elicited, every few years a sinkhole would open suddenly beneath a house or a crowd standing in the street and, in an instant, like the yawn of a sleeping giant, inhale it entire. No sooner had the bodies been recovered than the mouth was filled again and paved over.
The secret passage to the château led through this web of galleries, threatening collapse at every step. It meandered beyond the outskirts of town into open country (though you would never know it down below). And, without my navigation, it was impassable. As there was no signage or markers to go by, I always had with me a compass, an extra miner’s lamp, candles, and some matches. In certain sections, especially those of former limestone quarries, the ceilings were oppressively low. Frigidity and dankness, walls weeping and sooty from the days of torches, rhymed with the sepulchral dimensions to trigger claustrophobia, for which I also carried a remedy.
At about the four-hour mark, just when fatigue and panic began to overtake my followers, we would arrive at the destination. In imitation of the underground ossuary at the other end, I had ornamented the entrance lintel with a welcome message. The Reason of Sleep Dispels Monsters. Chiselled in the soft stone, the words waited for us, looking as though they had been there for centuries.
Shuffling after me, single file, up a narrow staircase, the newcomers trickled into the château’s cave, or wine cellar. Anyone who stooped and felt diminished as they progressed now regained their full height, discovering that the hole through which they had entered was human-sized. In this musty vaulted hall – with two stacked chests for a desk (to which a repurposed wine cask made a not-unhandsome stool) – I had set up my office.
It was there that the registration and handover of the first installment, for so I had arranged the order of business, would take place. All would be recorded, including the names of each boarder and their exact donation. Since the food supply was not monitored, I accepted non-perishables in any quantity, and meat, fruit, and vegetables in limited amounts. Once everyone had been processed, I would explain the code. Not an ounce of Potium, smuggled in case one could not get to sleep, was allowed on the premises (to my credit, I did not do searches). I had, I reassured them, a homemade solution: the Sandman, an anti-Potium. It did the trick. Satisfaction guaranteed. I joked that anyone who didn’t sleep like a baby was a monster.
With these formalities behind us, I conducted my strangers above ground, into the kitchen, where dormice mustered their winter hoard, and through the enfilade into the salon. It was just as Chevauchet and I had found it. Its dilapidation untouched, it seemed a sort of gathering place for shades, ghosts of the departed in a body but arrived from different eras. Open on the pianoforte was the sheet music for an orchestral work by Saint-Saëns. The instrument, the room’s centrepiece, dominated the other furniture, which crowded around it: several armchairs, a gilded Louis XVI sofa, an Empire chaise longue with floral motifs, and a Directory escritoire, all dimly duplicated by a wall of corroded mirrors. Enhancing this chimerical arrangement, reminiscent of an upscale brocante, and heightening even more the attendant sense that invariably overcame me of having stepped into the past, was the lamentable condition of the objects themselves – especially the upholstery, the velvet no less than the silk and the toile, the drapes, curtains, and wall fabric – which time, in its relentless pursuit of entropy, had sun-faded, moth-riddled, and torn with the claws of resident mousers into long strips. The floor creaked prohibitively, and in many places the unwaxed parquet had either lifted or caved in. That, in its advanced decadence, it all held together was beyond me.
I remembered finding the atmosphere of quiet suspension unusually soporific. Life outside was largely denuded of old objects, which the authorities had judged a major public distraction, hence a potential cause of unrest. The past was a liability. Keeping it around was a hazardous proposition. Nothing to see in history’s dry leaves! Keep going! Move along! Circulez!
From there, I led them upstairs to the sleeping gallery, furnished, in homage to opium dens, à la chinoise. (Their exhaustion was all the ‘opium’ needed by my guests.) Forty-one beds with clean grey sheets, blinds drawn tightly over the windows, and exposed Edison bulbs, for ambient lighting and their calming effect. Needless to say, none of this would have been possible without Chevauchet. Off Potium, up since five, and after long hours of feeling about underground, there and back, I had gone too long without rest.
‘Go get some sleep,’ Chevauchet would say to me when everyone else had retired. ‘I can watch over them.’ The forty-first bed was reserved for me.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
I awoke to find him gone. A regular sleeper, I was always the first to rise. Under my pillow, I discovered a leaf in Chevauchet’s hand, like a direct transcription of my own mind:
A blank page still gives the right to dream, and language is the most potent illusionist.
Night never falls, its approach interminable. The cold sun sets the temper of our brutal times. Only in nature’s course, or what is left of the seasons, does something like autumn shading into something like winter still have the right to its brushes and paints. We who still remark them want nothing more than to spin our waking thoughts into the phantasms of sleep, which extends our reflections by twisting and confusing them, making escape cables out of cobwebs and mazelike wildernesses out of orderly groves that keep us in check.
From the true black of night sprang both sleep and death. We may be sleeping on a bed of roses, yet their scent does not arouse their shape in our dreams. But this dullness of our senses is also a buffer, a defence. That which would be regrettable had we lain down in Paradise and could not feel it must be appreciated when we die to the world and must wake up in it. Once asleep, we are no longer alive to its ugliness, and its true horrors cannot touch us.
To keep my eyes open any longer is to act like our Antipodes, who on the other end of the transterrestrial tunnel strut upside down, and for whom we hang suspended like bats. Though the working classes were promised the world, and heaven with it, if they attained full consciousness of their material condition (whatever that meant), I find no such redemptive effect in nervous vigilance. The living the world over never sleep, yet their promised awakening is further off than ever. But at the hour that frees us from everlasting wakefulness, who will be alert? Who busy and restive on the night when sleep can at last hold sway and, as some have surmised, none shall ever wake again?
It was a farewell note, delivering on his notice that he would be leaving me.
We had had a bad fall. Chevauchet had hurt himself in the Pas de Loup, the Wolf Pass, among the more onerous climbs in these hypogean alps. After the accident, he had aged rapidly, doubling over like an old man without a cane. As his face grew waxe
n and haggard, and his gait moribund, I saw him, in the cold November drizzle, a scarecrow after a meagre harvest. Lost thus in a brown study, I read in his eyes that there would soon be nobody there.
At around the thirteenth hour, the first sleepers began to stir, and before long their chatting awakened the last, who took their time coming to, reluctant to let go of their dream sensations, wispy and evanescent like gossamer. I had, meanwhile, gone downstairs to lay the table, and presently announced that supper was waiting in the dining hall. The meal we owed to the previous parties, just as fare brought by the group about to sit down would feed the next. Kitchen duty I normally shared with Chevauchet, who made a mean chateaubriand. Proof we never begrudged them anything!
We ate by candlelight. I overheard one woman say she felt like a newborn, and that this must be the First Supper, heralding the Second Coming. Somebody else proclaimed sleep as the true Sabbath that will precipitate the Messianic Age – a remark I found more contrived than inspired. Listening to them go on, in broken silence, my thoughts darkened and took a morbid turn: ‘This is all very well,’ I said to myself, ‘but if what you say is true, shouldn’t one of you play the part of Judas?’
The moment had come for the balance to be rendered me for my services. I took out my pen and opened a large guest book, on whose cover I had tooled a cartouche of two swans with entwined necks. Then, one after another, I took down their dreams (or what remained of them), in the greatest possible detail, for safekeeping and posterity. These steadily accumulating volumes, I always prefaced, were a living archive, the future’s hypno-paideia. In the fly-leaf of each book, I had copied out the same text, from Chevauchet:
The Eyelid Page 8